Regarding Camels

When I was a student in Athens, there was an international scheme in place, where you could get addresses from children around the world and start a correspondence with them. Its purpose was to encourage students to practice and improve their writing skills in a foreign language and also to give them the opportunity to make new friends and to get a glimpse of different cultures around the world. I think the scheme was very successful and the process of applying quite exciting. I remember you had to tick the language you had chosen, amongst English, French, German and Spanish, and then also tick the countries you were interested in, in order of preference. There was a map of the world with the participating countries and the languages spoken in them. Finally you could choose if you wanted to correspond with a boy or a girl from your chosen countries. Then after waiting for a month or so, an envelope arrived with names and addresses, some perfectly matched; but if no person of your choice was available, a "wild card" person speaking your chosen language was picked for you.

I had five pen-pals as a result of this scheme. The first was a boy from Mexico who wrote to me in English.  His writing skills were not very good, but he had a very funny way of writing, making me laugh a lot. He wanted to be a footballer and he sent several photographs of himself and of his friends practising for his school team. We wrote to each other for two years and then he was accepted in a football academy and after that he stopped writing. The second boy was from Venezuela and he was writing to me in French, which was the language his father spoke. His French was very good and mine only basic, so I struggled a bit to reply to him and it took me a long time to put a letter together. He wanted to be a pilot, like his father, but at the age of fourteen he developed severe myopia, which apparently can prevent you from becoming a pilot. Our correspondence lasted for two and a half years.

The third person was a lovely girl from Malta. When she sent me her photograph I was really shocked. I think she looked almost identical to myself and I had never met anyone who looked so like me. Her parents and friends thought the same when I sent my photo to her. She was a very sweet girl who wrote beautifully in English about her holidays and her family and friends. We had a lot in common, especially our love for the sea and I was always expecting her letter in great anticipation. We corresponded for around four years and then a great family tragedy stopped her from writing to me any further. The fourth person was a girl from Sri Lanka. My correspondence with her started in 1992. She had the most amazing hand writing I have ever seen. Her letters were beautifully fluid, clear and perfectly spaced, with subtle curvy endings, reminiscent of the Sinhalese characters. The papers she wrote on were hand crafted, slightly translucent, with a faint smell of incense and spices. I kept every single one of her letters and envelopes and the stamps. She was in Colombo, in a boarding school, but originally from a village in the North. She wanted to become a doctor and she sent me photographs of herself dressed in beautiful traditional clothes, with fabrics of vibrant pink and orange hues. We corresponded more or less continuously since 1992, although she made me aware how the civil war was affecting the country and especially her family in the North. She was now a doctor in training, working with war casualties and the last letter I received from her was in 2005, just before the escalation of the conflicts. I hope she is well and practising medicine as she had always hoped, in peaceful and stable circumstances.

The final pen-pal to come out of this scheme, was a "wild card", to replace a request, for I think a girl from Portugal speaking in English. It was a girl from Egypt and now a great friend of mine. With this girl everything just happened really fast and it was like I knew her from the beginning. Maybe because she was from Egypt and Greece and Egypt have a long history of friendship, it felt like I was really speaking to a neighbour. Our letters came and went really fast, she replied very quickly and so did I. We exchanged numbers and often spoke very briefly on the phone. We told each other more or less everything in the letters, what was going on in school and in the personal lives. I cannot remember when we started writing, but when we were sixteen we decided that it was high time we met. The tickets were dead cheap and the flight only forty-five minutes long. I asked my mother if she could visit us and she said yes. But my friend was unable to get a visa to travel to Greece unaccompanied by an adult before her eighteenth birthday. But apparently I could. I could get a visa to travel and visit her and her family in Egypt by myself. So I asked my mother.

The debate lasted three months and my mother even consulted my father, something she almost never did. I was adamant that I should go. And of course she was adamant that I should not, as we did not know the family, the country, the language, the religion and the risks and dangers surrounding such a trip were immense. I am not sure how exactly I managed it, but I convinced my mother that I should go and made her speak to my friend's mother and father on the phone several times to reassure her. There were no mobiles at the time so I promised to ring every morning and every night and she had all the numbers she needed. And off I went.

The first time that I actually realised what I was doing, was when I landed in Cairo airport. There were so many people, with no queue, no visible order, that I thought I was going to get stuck in that airport forever. The fear came in cold waves, as people spoke loudly and pushed and pulled. And I just had a little frozen, trembling smile on my face, pretending I knew exactly what I was doing in that airport. I thought that was bad enough, but then I got out of the airport, through an open air corridor made up of plastic fences, which kept a sea of people on either side from devouring you. I was trying to find a face that matched my friend's father's face that I had seen in a photo. I could not see anything, but a sea of faces grimacing. As I was reaching the end of the open air corridor, I started to walk slower and slower, avoiding to reach the end of it, because what could await for me there, other than hundreds of eager taxi drivers to pick me me up and drive me somewhere or other? And as I felt the cold sweat and blood draining to my feet, in the very end of the corridor, there was my friend's father, a Telly Savalas look alike, the friendliest and warmest smile I had ever seen. And then my friend in their car and all of us driving to Heliopolis.

I fell in love with Cairo from the first night in the car, in the drive from the airport to the house. It still remains my favourite city, the atmosphere of it is unmatched by anything, the openness of it, the deep warmth and the mysterious allure of the Cairo nights are unforgettable. The Nile is something I will never forget either, I first saw him from the plane window, a huge flat illuminated black satin ribbon. A constant measure of everything else in the city. Of course, there is unprecedented noise in the streets during the day, a fine desert sand always moving in the air sticking to clothes, hair and skin, the heat reaching crazy highs filled with humidity. The hospitality I witnessed by my friend's family was unbelievable. They made me feel at home, I ate with them the most amazing foods, they showed me around so well that I got to see everything from a local's point of view. Not just like a foreign tourist. There are some things that I still think about and laugh, they represent Cairo for me so well.

I remember all the beeping of the cars in the streets as something out of this world. In the beginning it gave me such a headache, the noise of the horns being so intense and so much that it all merged in my ears into a continuous beeping noise, with occasional ups and downs. But slowly slowly I started to recognise and identify some noise patterns, beepings arranged in specific orders, with specific rhythms, occurring again and again. I asked my friend about it and she said that yes, there was a sequence of beeping for "turning right", one for "turning left", one for "move on", for "stop" and so on. Someone said that the light was so bright that the indicators did not really do the job so this was an acoustic alternative. There was even a beeping like, ta-ra-ta, ta-ra-ta, standing for ba-he-bek, ba-he-bek, (I love you-I love you) which a boy could beep with the car horn to a pretty girl in another car. I suspect there were also swearing beeping available. By the end of my stay in Cairo the beeping turned into a kind of music, sometimes rock-like, sometimes free-arranged and sometimes ethnic, making me involuntarily move my head in my seat with the beeps and occasionally jump on my seat when a genuine urgent beep was sounded.

One early evening we parked the car outside the club they belonged to, in Heliopolis, and I noticed that her father did not put the handbrake on. I wanted to say something, but I was afraid of being insulting, so I didn't say anything. I reckoned that since the whole city was so flat you did not need to use it. In the end of the evening, after a great time with friends at the club, we all walked back to the car in high spirits. But the car was not there. Immediately I felt guilty for not having said anything regarding the handbrake earlier. The whole area was filled with cars in our absence, all stuck together, bumper to bumper, but the old golden American car of theirs was nowhere around. I was surprised to see her father was not that bothered about this fact, and we started walking up and down the street. Then we just saw it, around 10 metres down the road, parked between two other cars. We got in as if nothing had happened. Then I could no longer keep myself from asking, but apparently no one used handbrakes, so that you could push the cars around to make space for everyone to park. This way there were no half-spaces left here and there, in which no car could fit. I thought that was the most hilarious and at the same time the most sane thing I had ever heard and I burst out in an uncontrollable laughter, that thankfully everyone shared with me.

The highlight of the trip was the visit to the pyramids. I think you are no longer allowed to walk on them, but you were still allowed then. I just could not understand it at all, as it looked like an illusion from close up. The sides of the pyramids were not smooth as they looked in the pictures taken from a distance, but made of high steps. Each step was huge, and you had to climb up it. I am not good with heights, so I did not go very high up. To get inside you had to crawl through a very narrow, dark, passage, people directly behind you and in front of you, filling up the whole long way. I am not that great with small enclosed spaces either and I was very relieved to get finally out, my heart pounding. All around the pyramids you could see Arabic horses and camels ready to give you a ride. I was immediately attracted to the camels, although horses were my favourite animals till then. The camels were just so cool and relaxed about everything. They sat around, lazily moving their mouths, as if chewing some kind of tobacco, occasionally spitting out like a bored sailor. They were above it all, looking around at all the silly tourists with a permanent lovely grin on their faces. I just loved them. Then my friend's father said we should all go for a ride and we could choose a horse or a camel.

Camel, modelling wax on steel armature, 1998

My friend's father and her brother and sister chose a horse, and herself and I and the owner were going on camels. Getting up a camel is a most peculiar thing. They sit down and you have to climb up their backs on a saddle. So far so good. Then they do the unexpected thing of getting up first on their back two legs, so that you suddenly fall forwards. You need to counteract this by leaning backwards. Once they are on their back two legs, they kneel on and then fully extend their front ones, so that you now fall backwards. Once on the camel I realised how high up I was. Much higher than on a horse. The camel walked in a sideways fashion, to begin with, leaning to the left and then to the right, making you very aware of your grip and feeling a bit wobbly. But after a while, the movement resembles being on a boat, it is quite relaxing and made me a bit sleepy. Then I realised we actually call the camels boats of the desert, probably for their use to move people and goods, but maybe for the way they move too. Just as I was getting accustomed to all that, and thinking what calm and well behaved and trained these camels were, the owner shouts a question to which everyone replies "yes" with great excitement. Someone starts to translate what's happening, but before I get hold of the first word, the owner makes an amazing call with his larynx, to which all animals, camels and horses, respond by breaking out in a frenzied race.

At that point in time I thought I was going to die from a camel fall. I was so sure of it that at some point when my grip of the saddle started to fail I almost gave up, just to make the fall come faster. The camel was making a great grounding noise in reply to the larynx calls of her owner and was running in an amazing speed I have never felt before or since in a car, boat or roller-coaster. When my arms and grip were failing an image of my mother passed like thunder in my eyes, of her blaming herself for letting me come here alone and dying from a camel fall. Then I ducked really low, with my chest almost parallel to the saddle, gripping the crazy camel from her hairs, the saddle too wet and slippery to hold on to any longer. At some point the camel slowed down and stopped, I cannot remember if someone shouted something or she just reached the end of the race. They all run and cheered and congratulated me for winning the race, especially the owner who wanted to take a picture with me. It's amazing how fast I forgot about my near death experience and indulged in some congratulatory handshakes.

I have since visited Egypt, Cairo and Alexandria one more time and my friend has since been to Greece too. She is now married in New York with a girl the same age as Aretousa. A great problem arises from this story for me, which is that I do not think I would let my daughter of sixteen, go on such a trip to see a pen-pal (let alone a cyber-found friend), who I have never met, in a foreign country. My friend has similar reservations. But I am afraid this is a step backwards in terms of the evolution of parenting. My mother yet again was light-years ahead of her time and I cannot thank her enough for this. Ironically, the weekend after I arrived in Athens, I went to see my cousins, and on Sunday, as we were playing hide and seek in their house, I slipped on the stair case and fell and broke my ankle. The Monday at school, leg plastered and with crutches, I told everyone that I got it from falling off the camel in Egypt. And everyone believed me and asked me to tell them again and again about the adventures there.

The letter Kappa, in Greek, is often associated with easy words for children, such as καλός  (good), κακός (bad), κακά (poo), καρδιά (heart) and so on. But I have chosen the word καμήλα (camel) to represent the letter Kappa. For years after my trip to Egypt I was obsessed with camels, drawing them from memory, making sculptures of them from different materials. For this letter I made stencils for Aretousa to colour in using a sponge.

The stencils 

Aretousa's desert