(NB: the pictures I am posting are rarely related to anything being written. They are just some fun ones that we've taken throughout the weeks.)
Two weeks ago, the last of our shipments arrived and so we finally have our UAB (unaccompanied air baggage), our HHE (household effects) from Yemen, our HHE from the US, and our POV (privately owned vehicle) all in one place, thanks to the Department of State’s generous shipping allowances. There are many perks to Foreign Service life, chief among them the DOS’s willingness to pack and schlep our stuff repeatedly around the globe. I will never be able to pack my own boxes or lift any heavy furniture ever again after I have been spoiled with packers and shippers for the past couple of years.
Whenever I feel guilty about the costs of our moves to all you taxpayers, I remind myself that this lifestyle would be untenable if we had to do this ourselves every two years. I know I wouldn’t last very long if I had to personally pack up my kitchen stuff so often. I also feel a little embarrassed by the sheer volume of things that we seem to ‘need’, and that has only grown with the addition of children to our family. There is nothing that drives home my materialism more than seeing towering stacks of boxes all with my name on them. However, once the bubble wrap has come off of everything and the boxes and paper have been folded away, I am so grateful to have all the bits and pieces that make our house a home.
Given that we will not likely be homeowners for a good long time, and will be living in government-assigned housing for the bulk of our lives, bringing along books, paintings and rugs will be a crucial part of weaving a thread of continuity through our peripatetic lives. I am so averse to change and transition, which makes it rather laughable to find myself a ‘trailing spouse’ to a diplomat husband. It certainly pushes the boundaries of what defines home, community and rootedness for me, and I imagine I will have to revise my definitions with each new post.The highlight of
last week was getting our paintings and pictures hung on our walls. I had delayed doing this until we had all our HHE shipments, because I felt that putting things up was the final step to being settled and we weren’t quite there yet. Since our apartment has concrete walls, we realized that we needed to call in the maintenance folks, who would surely have to use drills, plastic anchors, and specialized hooks and nails. Hah. Our picture hanger and his assistant Abdo (one of the janitors in the building) showed up with a hammer and proceeded to bash enormous nails into the walls, creating gaping holes. At one point, I showed Abdo where I wanted to put one of our wedding pictures and a Coptic cross side by side, then proceeded to put the cross down on the floor until they had the nails in the place. Abdo immediately dropped to his knees to rescue the cross from the floor and insisted that we hang it first—a funny moment of inter-religious reverence. I keep walking around our apartment, gazing at the walls and reacquainting myself with my beloved things. As for our POV, we had the interesting experience of going to the Cairo ‘DMV’ to get our drivers’ licenses. We are totally spoiled in that the embassy basically does the whole thing for us, thus sparing us days of bureaucratic wrangling, and it is our job to show up to get our pictures taken and sign in a ledger that we have received our licenses. The embassy shuttle dropped us off at the end of a road absolutely mobbed with cars and people and we pushed our way to the building where our expediter told us to sit down while he shuffled the papers from one window to the next. Our path there took us through the driver’s test course, which consisted of turning once around a single traffic cone. That explains a lot.
We had brought Theo along with us, and it wasn’t long before a very talkative woman spotted him and came over to sit across from us so that she could play with him. For almost an hour, she snapped her fingers, chuckled and waved at him, and he obliged with many ready smiles. She couldn’t really pronounce his name, so quickly shortened it to ‘Tutu’ and I was ‘Umm Tutu’ (mother of Tutu.) At one point, he wriggled a bit because it was stiflingly hot, and she was convinced that he was hungry and kept saying loudly that I was starving him and offering him her bottle of mineral water. Clearly she did not have a good view of his thighs. Then she got hold of his chew toy to shake at him, but repeatedly grabbed it away from him because she was afraid that he would put it in his mouth. Huh? Isn’t that what babies DO? I was completely mystified by this until my sister explained to me later that Egyptians spend the first year of their children’s lives slapping their hands and toys away from their mouths because they are convinced that not doing so will lead to them chewing their fingers and putting objects in their mouths as adults. I guess the concept of an oral phase is just not widely known or accepted here. Anyway, we have our licenses in hand and are now legit drivers.
With that, we took our POV for our first trip out of Cairo last Friday to visit the Kennedys at their Red Sea chalet. There are several resort areas along the Red Sea coast in Egypt, and this particular one is the closest to Cairo, about 90 minutes away. My sister and her husband had the foresight several years ago to buy a small chalet when this particular resort was being developed for what would be peanuts to us in the West. The prices have now soared on similar properties, so they really lucked out. We spent the day there reveling in the joy of being outside in decently clean air, enjoying the sand and sea, and watching our children have the time of their lives together. We hope this will be the first of many more visits.
August is slowly passing with string
s of very hot days. We don’t venture out much to anywhere that isn’t air-conditioned except for the pool. Even that is a little toasty. Theo is rolling, creeping and starting to sit up, which means that my days of carefree inattentiveness to his movements are on the wane. This is the delightful stage of babyhood, I must say: ready smiles and chuckles, lots of emerging personality, scrumptious chubbiness, and unabashed joy at the mere sight of me. What’s not to love? With mobility comes the beginning of The Will and Boundaries. I’m in no hurry to get there.
