Just two weeks ago I was watching women carrying bundles of clothing on their heads, walking down a dirt path between two sugar cane fields.

Sunday, October 28, 2001

Just two weeks ago I was watching women carrying bundles of clothing on their heads, walking down a dirt path between two sugar cane fields. They were headed toward the Nile River where they would join others from their village in the morning ritual of washing clothes by slapping them against the rocks.

I couldn’t hear their conversations, but I could imagine their comments about children in school and the rice harvest. They probably also talked about how difficult it is to get the galabeas white with the motorboats spewing fuel residues on the water.

I was on a small and very comfortable cruise ship. It was like a dream coming true for me – the experience of seeing, touching, hearing, and tasting Egypt, of truly being there, not through the pages of an art history book or a television screen, but for real. At dawn we listened to the chanting sounds coming from the mosques, and the Egyptian sun had risen red and hot over the river leaving sparkling lines of color in its wake.

It was like living in two different worlds. One, thousands of years old where the clothes washing routine reminded me of pictures in my Bible, and the other, floating along in air-conditioned comfort with new friends from across the United States.

The contrasts didn’t stop there. The busy, horn-honking traffic in Cairo included wooden carts pulled by donkeys – carts containing wooden crates filled with delicious looking tomatoes and peppers or almost overflowing with sugar cane.

Our tour director called on his cell phone, making sure our travel arrangements were in order, and then we visited a factory where we learned how to strip, cut, dry, and press the papyrus plant just like when the very first writing materials were produced.

We rode in air-conditioned motorcoaches out to the pyramids built thousands of years ago by masterminds of architecture. We descended into the depths through a narrow chamber, walking bent at the waist into the unknown where the heat was stifling and there was no air movement to cool us, until we finally emerged into the 95 degrees that awaited us.

We left comfortable motorcoaches, walking a few blocks down a dusty street, and then climbing (I was hoisted by a little Egyptian man, because my camel didn’t have stirrups on the wooden saddle.) onto the animal that was to take us on a bumpy, jiggling ride around and over a rocky ledge and out into the Sahara Desert.

We lived in absolute cleanliness while street cleaners with straw brooms tried to maintain a relatively clean environment against heavy odds.

We learned that while in America we count on rainfall to provide much needed moisture and to &uot;clean things up&uot; occasionally, there is only one inch of recorded rainfall a year in that country, and they are totally dependent on the Nile River to bring life to the short distance irrigated by its waters.

We learned that history is a part of their everyday lives – the life that has not changed for thousands of years and also the part that has been affected by technology. In 1865, when the United States was still trying to decide whether we would be one nation or two, the Egyptian government formed a Department of Antiquities dedicated to the purpose of restoring and preserving its monuments.