New Years Resolution or UN Resolution
Robert Bauval (henk) - 31.12.2002 13:06
Robert Bauval
 http://members.boardhost.com/Bauval/msg/119.html
New Year RESOLUTION... or U.N. RESOLUTION?
Posted by Bauval on December 29, 2002, 7:46 am
Message modified by board administrator December 29, 2002, 12:54 pm
A NEW YEAR RESOLUTION…
..OR U.N RESOLUTION?
Since 1870 the Monsef family have lived since the 1870s in the palm grove just outside the Saqqara necropolis, overlooking the Step Pyramid of Djoser. Traditionally, the men and women of the Monsef family have always worked at the Saqqara necropolis, either as night-watchmen, water carriers or as overseers of digs for archaeological expeditions. The head of the family today is Sheikh Mosef, a 70 year old patriarch and a good and dear friend of mine since the early 1980s. Due to the ‘modernisation’ of the Antiquities Organisation in Egypt, the Monsef has slowly been ousted from their traditional jobs at Saqqara, and they rely today more and more on their own meagre crop resources and ad hoc jobs at the necropolis. The young children –there are eight of them— deliver the water on donkey back to the guards and workers in the necropolis before and after school hours. Ibrahim, the eldest son of Sheikh Monsef, is presently the overseer of the labourer digging near the Unas Pyramid, where two 2nd Dynasty mastabas have been discovered.
Every time I travel to Egypt I make it a point to take clothing for the children, and also for the men and women of the Monsef clan. I also help in other ways by bringing to them medicine and essential food supplies from Cairo. Three generations live together in a large mud brick house in the palm grove, where they also keep two water buffaloes, sheep, goats and several donkeys. They also keep chicken, geese and pigeons. There is also the usual smatter of mongrel dogs and cats. In the winter of 1998, while having tea with Sheikh Monsef and his eldest son Ibrahim, the wife of the latter gave birth inside the house to a baby girl. Since I was the first man to hold the infant, I was asked by Sheikh Monsef to become the god-father of the child. I was also asked to name her. I chose the name of Sabra, which means ‘the patient one’. The name, which is very uncommon in Egypt, is found in the legend of St. George, Patron saint of the Copts (and also, oddly, the British). According to one account of this legend, St. George married the ‘daughter of the king of Egypt, called Sabra’. The name much pleased Sheikh Monsef, and it was accordingly adopted. Sabra is now 4 years old, and is a very pretty and rather vivacious little girl, with a smart and witty disposition. Here is a photo taken a month or so ago, of the Monsef children. Sabra is on the lower left.
These smiling kids encapsulate the joy of youthful innocence in Egypt and, in many ways, of the whole Arab world. Children are children, no matter where you are, what culture you come from, what race and what creed. In their eyes are the common spark of humanity that is in all of us, capable of love, joy, pain, sorrow, and all the emotions that make up the human race.
But the innocence of these children, and children all over the Middle East, is threatened by the terrible unrest that has plagued that part of the world in 2002. Ugly talk of war is again on the lips of the warmongers, of the hawks, of these men in grey that roam the corridors of power in the United States and in Britain. As if two world wars were not enough; as if the horrors and injustice in Palestine were not enough; as if the genocides and ethnic cleansing in Chechnya were not enough; as if the killing fields of Afghanistan were not enough; as if the poverty, the famine, the hardships in Africa and India were not enough; as if the terrorist calamities and horrors, the suicide bombings and the killing of the innocent were not enough, these men in grey, these spinners of words, these artists of rhetoric are demanding another pound of flesh in a frenzied and dangerous mood of destruction, of vengeance and of power.
But violence must not be met by more violence. Killings must not be met by more killings. Injustices must not be met by more injustices.
In the frustrated voice of our modern bards:
When will they ever learn?
Yes, when will they ever learn?….
Our New Year Resolution should be:
PLEASE, MR. BUSH AND MR. BLAIR, NO MORE WARS ON THIS PLANET.
So Happy New Year 2003, and peace to all men and women of good will.
Robert G. Bauval
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