 |
| Sazlin Daud was once an overworked corporate lawyer. She quit practice, became a homemaker (no maids, this is the real stuff), trailed her husband to Egypt for a few years and gave birth to her most difficult client yet - her son. In between ironing, changing diapers and cleaning the cat's litter box, she reminisces about the Egyptian winter, rice pudding and fresh strawberries. |
JAN 10 — The long school holidays are over, and with that, the flurry of weddings. Makeshift placards by the roadside directing wedding guests to the venues of celebration are all that remain as evidence of the concluded ‘wedding season’.
In this age of e-mails and e-greeting cards for everything from birthdays to Hari Raya, I derive great pleasure in receiving tactile wedding invitation cards in the mail.
And my, what beautiful wedding cards they have now.
DEC 26 — I dread making visits to the doctor, especially, if they are specialists based in outpatient clinics at hospitals. Not so much because I fear them, but because often, there is so much waiting involved before we finally get to the consultation room.
Each specialist will have his/her own method of attending to patients at these clinics. There are those who will not take appointments, but will attend to you on a first-come first-served basis. This often means that long before the clinic has even opened in the morning, a large crowd will already be milling about near the registration counter, and everyone will dash there the minute it opens in order to get their names at the top of the list.
Even then, it’s not uncommon for this pre-emptive practice to mean squat when the doctor arrives late and everyone still ends up playing the long waiting game, sometimes up to 2 hours.
DEC 5 — There are many things that I miss about Egypt, but the often lackadaisical adherence on the part of her people to follow basic rules of etiquette — like queuing or waiting for one’s turn, wasn’t one of the things that I fondly recollected.
Trying to get your fruits and vegetables weighed and priced at the weighing counter in a supermarket will always involve a huge scramble because everyone will be clamouring to place their purchases on the scales at the same time.
It doesn’t help that the counter employee doesn’t seem to acknowledge (or worse yet, understand) the practice that, first in queue is first to be attended to. It’s very easy to identify the newly-arrived expatriates on those occasions because they will be the ones who are up in arms in exasperation while the more seasoned expatriates (okay, like myself) will simply join in the shoving fray in order to get our fruits and vegetables weighed.
NOV 14 — Six months into our Cairo sojourn, I had offered my time to conduct pro bono English language classes for some Malaysian undergraduates who were studying at Al-Azhar University and other tertiary institutions in the city.
A chance encounter at an expatriate community centre with a fellow Malaysian, Kak Z, got us talking about how each Malaysian, whether abroad or at home, was duty-bound to ‘give back’ to country and society.
Enthused at the prospect of being able to do something meaningful, I offered to help out with the English classes Kak Z had established the year before.
OCT 30 — In his recent Budget 2010 speech, our Prime Minister announced that RM1 billion will be spent to help the police beef up their enforcement services. He targets a reduction of 20 per cent in snatch thefts and robberies by the end of 2010. The initial response to that proposal will of course be positive — crime levels have escalated to such alarming heights in Malaysia that any effort or initiative towards crime reduction and prevention will be warmly embraced.
