Three ladies in Cairo by Anne Edelstam

Author:Anne Edelstam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Readings in a coffee cup

I started my first day feeling like an orphan, thinking, Now I’m on my own, I’ll have to cope somehow. Like a soldier, I readily endured my fate without complaints. Too sensitive and too polite for my own good, I didn’t protest, and it did not work out so well in the long run either. Diplomats’ children do not have much of a choice though, and neither do their parents, having embarked on a special path. The positive sides – like growing up in different countries, with different cultures, meeting different people – often take precedence over the negative ones, I knew that. The dark sides – like encountering injustice, racism, and nepotism – lurk in the backwaters, though, and I had already encountered them at a young age. But the family had always been there as a buffer zone. No longer. For a while, I did cope, but that did not last.

Shortly after my parents’ departure, I got a rather desperate letter from Mamma:

Papa is furious. The embassy compound isn’t at all finished. It is being built on the island that we visited, if you remember? It’s close to the Sporting Club. But the work has been so delayed. We’re still staying in the hotel, but Papa doesn’t like that. It looks like the building will take some time. I’ll have to look for an apartment to rent. His office is in a rather shabby building too. Everything here takes more time than at home and involves lots of discussions. It seems that the head of the construction site has put quite a lot of the Swedish state’s money in his own pocket!. Not a great start to our stay here.

My parents’ belongings shipped from home included a significant quantity of essential products that my mother thought would be missing in Egypt. She did not know that President Sadat’s open-door policy had already had its effect and that most essentials were available in Egypt.

“So what do you intend to do with the hundreds of rolls of toilet paper that you insisted on shipping here, and all the soap, not to mention the bottles of shampoo?” My father couldn’t help laughing. The import-export economy had really taken off.

Touring around the city, Ingrid discovered that tourism had exploded. She passed several new hotels under construction. The Egyptians were taking out their saved money from beneath their mattresses and spending it. Many found work in the rich neighbouring Arab countries, sending the income – as well as refrigerators, television sets, and so forth – back home to their families in Egypt.

“They have the money, we have the brains,” Leila told her. “But many of our best-educated men are leaving for lack of jobs here. They have the skills that the Arabs don’t have. Many are engineers, professors, academics of all sorts.” She sighed.

“Is that why the city is such a state?”

“That’s corruption! The result of dictatorship.”

“How come?” Ingrid said.

“It’s simple. The government only employs people who support them, all the others are dismissed.

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