Pyramids and Egypt

Pyramids are made of limestone. 

Ancient seabed of living creatures compressed, forgotten, found, cut, stacked to the sky. 

Visited by generations past, now looking down on a city of living creatures pressed together. Who later will crumble and die, and still the fish will wait.

If I ignore the hawkers, carnival barkers, the graffiti and the tourists, the garbage and noise of bulldozers, I hear water lapping on the shore.

A glimpse of a local wedding celebration at Edfu. Cars, decorated with colored, hand cut paper, travel through town beeping horns and waving to passersby.
In Aswan Madame Mubarak passes by after opening an heart surgery hospital. Limos and heavily armed Hummers accompany her progress. 
Andreahs' is the best restaurant in Cairo according to a former Egyptian ambassador. 
Dined with a modern Nubian family; son of a banker, this father a dam engineer. Now employed at the Botanical Gardens and formerly at the Kuwait oil fields. His daughters live above and below him in house floor additions built to accommodate their families. His son spends the evening in his bedroom listening to Arabic radio. The boy was born unexpectedly and late in his parents life. Tradition holds that the oldest male is responsible for caring for elderly parents. A decision was made that he would stop attending school in 6th grade, the earliest legally allowed. This will prevent any opportunity to move to other countries. He will stay and inherit his family home along with his responsibilities as caregiver for what will soon be his elderly, widowed mother.

Spent the morning with the second son of a West Bank farm family in Luxor. His parents and brothers all live together, tilling and harvesting the land in sight. Mud bricks are drying in the sun. A room addition is being built for the new baby he and his wife are expecting. 

He speaks of the mixed blessing of the Aswan dam. While the fatal Nile floods each spring had cost lives it also replenished the soil and increased harvest productivity. The influx of soil carried by the annual flooding endangers the dam and so it is dug out and made available free for the farmers. Trucking the soil is not financially viable for the small, multi-generation farm families and it remains unused. 

I participate in demonstrations of techniques for making reed chairs and date palm rope. The chairs are sold for additional income and it is apparent the rope is put use and not just a tourist demonstration. That same style of rope is later seen on the 4000 year-old temple boat displays at the pyramids in Cairo. 

The Nile Cruise passed scenes of modern factories interspersed with thatch-roofed mud clay houses where water is cooled in hand-formed clay pots. Free water for all, both visitors or those passing by. Childhood memories of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty novels fill my head as I watch a riderless Arabian horse flying along the riverbank in an apparent defiance of gravity.

Old Cairo- a mash of churches, temples, synagogues melded together. Next to one another, over one another, and converted from one to another and back. A mosh pit of religious beliefs.
A trip in time and place, where antiques are 300 years old or deemed modern. 
Surrounded by friendly, smiling people all anxious to help.
Poverty but proud. 

Children ask for pens and pencils because those allow education.

I think of home and the containers filled with writing instruments, sitting as clutter there unused and uncared for.