Egyptian Sector
But several men and a group of young children were gathered there. Curious, I walked across a dune tangled with rusted remnants of barbed wire and entered the unexpected world of Sheikh Salam Saad Salem and his 400 or so Bedouin of the accommodation Barcelona. With his noble visage and graceful white kaffiyeh, Sheikh Salem might have been taken for some ancient desert prophet�but for the sun-faded suit jacket beneath his flowing Bedouin headgear and the rusted mid-sixties Chevy pickup parked beside him on the barren dune. Yes, he told me, he had lived for many years under the Israelis, who had built a medical clinic for his tribe. When the Egyptians replaced the Israelis, little changed for the Al Sawaada tribe, the old days of free wandering were over. Numerous new roads and settlements built by the Israelis had inevitably constricted the Bedouin’s old seminomadic life-style. Both Israelis and Egyptians, it seemed, preferred keeping the once wandering Bedouin in one place, Biblical echoes reverberate in modern Sinai as a Bedouin woman (right) bakes unleavened bread similar to that made in haste and carried out of Pharaoh’s Egypt by the Israelites of the Exodus. After their miraculous escape through the sea into Sinai, the fleeing multitude came to an oasis called Elim, set about by 70 palm trees. At a similar oasis (below) a woman sorts dates from surrounding palms. When dry, the fruit will help supply the family and their herds of camels, goats, and sheep with food for the winter. “In spring the women go out with the goats,” Sheikh Salem told me. “We pick dates; do some trading some of the men get jobs building roads or at the oil fields. Some go off to Suez or Cairo to study, to work. They send money home but come back only for visits. “Of course,” he smiled, “we have many children! I myself have 17 by my two wives. What else can you do in the desert?” I was led into a low three-room shack nearby, consisting of two schoolrooms and a But what had the recipient done to deserve such an award? I asked. Neither the sheikh nor the teachers said anything. They averted their eyes. “Did he work against the Israelis?” I asked. “Did he spy for the Egyptians?” Silence was my answer�the usual close-lipped response by the ever cautious Bedouin to outsiders’ probing questions. After all, who knew whether or not the Egyptian or Israeli authorities might take offense at whatever they said, always in the middle�the Bedouin. Teachers’ dormitory. Through a thin wall at one end of the schoolroom came a chorus of children’s voices chanting what sounded to me not unlike a liturgy. “No, they aren’t saying their prayers,” I was told. “They say their arithmetic sums in unison!” One of the teachers showed me a large framed and glassed document. It had been awarded, I was told, to a local Bedouin. The graceful Arabic calligraphy was paraphrased into English for me: TO ONE OF THE SONS OF SINAI AWARD OF THE FIRST CLASS IN APPRECIATION OF HIS SPECIAL EFFORTS IN THE OCTOBER 1973 WAR/signed/ ANWAR SADAT PRESIDENT OF THE ARAB REPUBLIC OF EGYPT
