Africa in the New York Times

Two articles from today’s online New York Times caught my attention.

First, some new research suggests that the transition of northern Africa from Savannah to Sahara was gradual and over about 6000 years.

Next, alarmingly, the Times reports that regional war and the global increase in food prices portend a major famine in the Horn of Africa.

Around the web

I have about three big posts brewing, but until I have time to finish them up, I did want to share some interesting things I’ve read over the past few days.

Michael Slackman of the New York Times has an article today about noise in Cairo. Don your ear mufflers, and read A City Where You Can’t Hear Yourself Scream.

A young Egyptian woman named Pakinam wrote a powerful blog entry on her decision to wear hijab: To Veil or Not to Veil.

Jae Ran at the great blog Harlow’s Monkey gives some great advice to parents on how we can be allies to our transracially adopted kids.

The cost of bread in Cairo

My mom forwarded to me a recent article from the LA Times about the economy of everyday life in Cairo. According to the article, the price of bread has doubled in the past year, from 25 to 50 piasters, from less than five cents to a little less than ten cents. Pennies indeed to an American, but consider that (as the article mentions) some doctors here make only $45/month.

On Sunday, the New York Times had a story about how the rough economy in Egypt means young people can’t afford to get married. The Times estimates that couples need about $21,000 (yup, US dollars) in order to afford the bride price (ugh), ceremony, apartment, and furniture.

Unmarried young people are increasingly turning to religion to offset their unhappiness. The Times says that this religious fervor has repercussions beyond the nation and region:

Here in Egypt and across the Middle East, many young people are being forced to put off marriage, the gateway to independence, sexual activity and societal respect. Stymied by the government’s failure to provide adequate schooling and thwarted by an economy without jobs to match their abilities or aspirations, they are stuck in limbo between youth and adulthood. …

In their frustration, the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose, pulling their parents and their governments along with them.

With 60 percent of the region’s population under the age of 25, this youthful religious fervor has enormous implications for the Middle East. More than ever, Islam has become the cornerstone of identity, replacing other, failed ideologies: Arabism, socialism, nationalism.

The wave of religious identification has forced governments that are increasingly seen as corrupt or inept to seek their own public redemption through religion. In Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Algeria, leaders who once headed secular states or played down religion have struggled to reposition themselves as the guardians of Islamic values. More and more parents are sending their children to religious schools, and some countries have infused more religious content into their state educational systems.

More young people are observing stricter separation between boys and girls, sociologists say, fueling sexual frustrations. The focus on Islam is also further alienating young people from the West and aggravating political grievances already stoked by Western foreign policies. The religious fervor among the young is swelling support for Islam to play a greater role in political life. That in turn has increased political repression, because many governments in the region see Islamic political movements as a threat to their own rule.

While there are few statistics tracking religious observance among the young, there is near-universal agreement that young people are propelling an Islamic revival, one that has been years in the making but is intensifying as the youth bulge in the population is peaking.

I don’t think I can add anything here. Read the article, and let me know what you think.

Poverty, corruption, and bread in Cairo

If you are at all interested in Egypt, or in poverty and government corruption, check out this New York Times article on subsidized bread in Cairo.

The photo with the article shows a man selling bread. That kind of bread is for sale everywhere in this city, including piled high on large woven trays held by men riding bikes, and spread out on blankets on top of the dirty sidewalks.

This article reminded me of how little I know about Egypt, including this staggering statistic:

It is hard to make ends meet in Egypt, where about 45 percent of the population survives on just $2 a day.

And it’s not like everything is cheap in Cairo. I find local food to be very affordable, but of course I’m not making local wages. But I also live in a part of town where apartments can rent for $3000 (that’s American dollars) and up per month. That’s shocking to me. I live in an apartment provided by my employer; we could never afford to live here otherwise.

In another, apparently unrelated article, also in the New York Times, President Bush, on his winter vacation to the Middle East and most recently in Egypt, is quoted as saying this to Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak:

“I appreciate the example that your nation is setting,” he said, facing the Egyptian president.

I’m not blogging politics, not Egyptian politics, because, well, I don’t know much. Also, yikes, I’m a guest here, and you can get in trouble for what you say and do.

But I do know that Bush’s comments are disgraceful. Check out the article if you don’t know much about Egypt and are interested in the corruption sampler.

One-way dialogue

I’m taking a break from the London travelogue (is it boring you to pieces anyway?) because of some recent news on adoption.

Adoption, and especially transnational and transracial adoption, has been in the news a lot over the past several months, even aside from the usual rumors and speculations about celebrity adopters. A recent series of blog posts in the New York Times angered many when one of the contributors referred to her Chinese daughter’s “Mongolian features” (cringe). And then the Times didn’t publish many critical comments from adoptees.

To be fair, the series also included some good pieces, including one called “I Am Not a Bridge” by Sumeia Williams. Williams writes about her pain growing up without any Asian peers in her white, midwestern community. She has a great line which may not make any sense out of context, but here goes: “Perhaps the role of the adoptive parent could be viewed, not so much as a bridge, but as a builder of bridges, connecting their children to themselves and their ethnicities.” Very inspiring.

In other news, the French citizens who (allegedly) kidnapped not-really-orphans from Chad were referred to as thwarted adopters.

A Dutch dimplomatic family made headlines when the parents disrupted the adoption of their seven year old daughter, who had been their daughter since she was four months old. The daughter was born in South Korea, though her parents abandoned her in Hong Kong. The parents never processed the paperwork for their daughter to become a Dutch citizen, so now this girl doesn’t even have the Dutch government (her father’s employer) looking out for her. This one is particularly shocking to me.

In October, I posted about adoption ethics and mentioned a great article by Elizabeth Larsen in Mother Jones Magazine. Larsen has a follow up news piece currently on the Mother Jones website, which is what inspired this post today.

Larsen talks about the discourse in adoption, about how it’s a “one-way dialogue” controlled primarily by adoptive parents. She writes, “in some adoptive-parent communities, anything questioning the current practices in the adoption universe leads to a virtual stoning of the messenger.” I have experienced this personally. I’m active (though less so now) in some online adoption forums, and I really pissed off some folks when I raised questions about the ethics of Ethiopian adoptions generally and more specifically about practices of the agency we used for both boys’ adoptions.

I was accused of stirring the pot and making trouble. Moi? Yeah, probably, but nothing I said was speculative. I was asking questions, sharing stories, and making observations.

All of this lead to, most recently, me being called anti-Semitic and racist.

I can take all that. What’s really troubling, though, is that many of my own insights come from adult adoptees who have shared their stories via memoirs, fiction, and blogs. Yet many adoptive parents dismiss these folks as “angry adoptees,” as if their anger means their points are invalid, or as if we adoptive parents could never make the same mistakes made by earlier generations of adoptive parents.

Parents who want to adopt are required, at least in theory, to do a fair amount of self-education, mostly self-policed, and some people take this more seriously than others. And for some people, the education ends when the homestudy is done or when the new child is home.

But some adoptive parents keep reading and thinking. That’s a big part of the reason we’ve ended up in Egypt (which is ironic considering the racism here, but that’s a story for another day): I want my kids to know the world beyond the US, in a diversity of cultures and places.

I do wonder how, as adoptive parents, we can move past our own selfish joy and really listen to valid criticism. It can be hard not to feel defensive when stories like the ones I mentioned above, about the Dutch couple who abandoned their daughter and the French charity workers who abducted kids, are in the news and reflect poorly on all of us. But international adoption is fraught with corruption and scandal, and we can’t pretend away our own culpability.

NY Times on first family searches

The Sunday Magazine of the New York Times has an article this weekend on first family searches in international adoption. Definitely worth reading.

Fun with blogging

Most of you readers, I suspect, are people who actually know us or are folks who have some connection to Ethiopian kids or Egypt or something or other.

But a few people find my blog through internet searches. Each day, WordPress tells me the search terms people have entered which, somehow, got them here. So here are a few search terms that recently, somehow, people entered and then ended up at this blog:

ethiopian corn
American family blog Cairo
camels how big it is
big pictures of camels in egypt
kids in egypt crowd around you
egyptian sicknesses
egyptian prayer mats (I really don’t get this one)
should i move to cairo egypt 2007

First off, for some of my colleagues, how about that natural language searching?

Next, ethiopian corn? I can’t imagine that searcher found what they wanted here. And to answer the camel question: very big. And to answer the last question: yes, move to Cairo.

Next, a few folks have asked about the pseudonyms. (Confession: my children’s names are not actually Giggle and Bug.) My kids’ names are unusual and I don’t want them to hate me even more as teenagers, so I’m trying to keep things a bit private.

The cat had a pseudonym because I didn’t want to leave him out. And, yes, our nanny has a pseudonym, though careful readers will note I have given her a new Ethiopian name. How culturally sensitive of me.

Mr. Four’s name has drawn some comments. I was following a pretty common convention amongst women bloggers of called their partners Mr. NameoftheBlog.

I’m open to suggestions for new psedonyms. If I pick yours, you win! I’ll send you a postcard from Egypt. As soon as I can figure out where to buy postcards.

Finally, another interesting note: have you ever used Google News alerts to send you an email when something is published in an area of interest? A friend of mine here in Cairo gets alerts when something about “Egypt” is published online. And she gets feeds from my blogs. That’s right. Google News is aggregating this very blog.

It must have been a slow news day when someone decided to do that. (And yes, I know that an actual person didn’t actually decide anything.)

The Jena Six

Have you heard about this case from Louisana? Here’s a great video summary (thanks to Carmen at Racialicious for posting this, as well as links to other news about the Jena Sex):

The narrator makes a great point: with all the media saturation of the Duke Lacrosse case, why was there no press looking at the Jena Six?

An American hamburger in Cairo

Through expat Maryanne over at Living in Egypt, I found an article in Time magazine (from July) about an American restaurant here in Cairo which, the writer claims, makes “the best hamburger in the world.”

I’ve not one for hamburgers, but a dinner out to someplace the kids would like seemed in order. And the promise of a good burger tantalized Mr. Four.

And he agrees: his was, indeed, one of the best hamburgers he’s ever had. Apparently they grind their own meat in-house. The restaurant is called Lucille’s, and it’s pretty close to us. The owner is from Colorado.

For as hard as it is to adapt to living in a different country, our part of town is very accommodating of westerners, particularly Americans. Lots of signs are in English, lots of people speak English, and there are restaurants like Domino’s, McDonald’s, Chili’s, and more.

At Lucille’s, I had chicken souvalki, and it was also delicious.

Educated migrants

The International Herald Tribune is a daily paper published by the New York Times. Mr. Four found it last week at our local market, and it’s been a treat to read, particularly on Mondays, when it reprints some stories from Sunday’s New York Times, including Thomas Friedman and Frank Rich.

Monday’s paper had an interesting article about middle class, educated people from western countries who are moving overseas for professional jobs. The article focuses on two faculty at the American University in Sharja, United Arab Emirates.

Take a gander if you are interested.

Update: this article is also in today’s New York Times online.