Shweya, Shweya, Blaucal, Blaucal

We had our home and we had the heating, but not much else, and Algeria in 2004 was rather limited in its choice of furniture.  We decided to start with beds for the children (we had brought our own Ikea one) and found a wonderful carpenter who lived on our road and who actually listened to my husband and made everything according to our explicit instructions.  I had this bright idea that it would be nice to have guest beds that slid under the beds and could be pulled out whenever necessary and he made them with a clip to stay attached to the bed underneath when not in use and with castors for easy use.  These became the bane of my life as the head of each of the beds was  in an alcove, and then as the guest bed became very dusty, I had to pull the bed out of the alcove, then pull the guest bed out, clean it, clean the floor underneath the bed and then push the guest bed back in, and push the bed back in place.  What a palava!  To add insult to injury, when we had guests they usually preferred to sleep on mattresses directly on the floor - so much cooler in the hot summer months. We now use the guest beds as low divans (we gave two away) in our living room which have become very popular with the family and guests alike.  I have had many a guest come and lie down and promptly fall asleep… can’t think why!

Most homes have much the same furniture with much the same arrangement, although 9 years on this has changed a little.  Every living room (called a ‘salon’ here, the French may have left but their influence lives on), has at least 2 ‘canopies’.  Now, where I come from ‘canopy’ means cover or shelter, but here it means something that resembles a divan, sometimes with two drawers underneath for storage.  The mattress is covered in the same material as the three big cushions that form support for the back, and sometimes they put a big round armrest on either side also covered so that it looks like a pseudo sofa.  It’s fine until you sit down and decide to lean on one of the arm rests which then slides off the end of the canopy and leaves you unbalanced (in more ways than one) and if you’re holding a cup of coffee then you’re really stuffed. 

All salons have a ‘bibliothèque’ which I learnt in my French classes in school as the word for library, but here in Algeria it means display case with not a book in sight, but instead coffee and glass sets and other various ornaments.  Of course you have to have the coffee table, and maybe a television in the corner and often you may also have a wardrobe with some large alien shapes on top (usually large saucepans for the huge amounts of food to be cooked during weddings, funerals etc.) draped in embroidered material, maybe a vase or two of dried flowers and…. a suitcase, also draped in embroidered material.  If you ever got a glimpse inside one of these wardrobes you could be forgiven for  thinking that your host had OCD, because you will ALWAYS find each shelf (and you will find only shelves, never any bars from which to hang clothes) with all the contents immaculately folded in order of size, with the shelf trimmed in frilly lace.  I have tried in the past to keep clothes on shelves very neatly folded, but all it takes is one frantic rush to pull something out from underneath all the rest of the clothes, for my efforts to resemble the bargain bin in a department store.  And the suitcase?  That’s usually something the bride brings with her when she moves in.  An Irish friend visited us in 2004 and, after visiting some of my in laws in their homes, she laughed at how every home was exactly as I had said it would be, and all almost identical.

Our next venture was to have fitted wardrobes in the bedrooms made.  My husband insisted on having the carpenters come from the town near where we first moved to Algeria… an hour and a half’s journey each way from our home.  ‘They are known for their carpentry in this area and they are experts at what they do’ he explained.  When I asked him what will happen if they can’t get a lift to our home, he told me that it would be their problem.  As I expected… it became our problem with my husband driving there to collect them and then bring them home in the evening.  They measured up for the wardrobes and then brought the framework first and then afterwards, the doors.  Builders in Algeria seem to have the attitude of why use a spirit level when you can just as easily use a thread and some nails.  As a result many houses have a little quirkiness to them, which doesn’t endanger the safety of the house, but can be a challenge when decorating, and, in this case building cupboards.  Of course the frames didn’t fit properly because the walls and floors were not all the same level all the way across, so the gaps had to be filled in and disguised.  Finally we had our doors and our wardrobes looked great… until we opened the doors.  ‘Mum, these wardrobes are really nice’, said my 9 year old son, ‘but where are we supposed to hang up our clothes?’  Good question… considering there was absolutely nothing at all inside the doors… no side partitions, no shelves, no… nothing!  ‘Oh but they are extra’ said our carpenter-experts-in-their-field (I kind of wished I could just shove them out in a field and leave them there).  So we had to pay them extra, more trips up and down before we finally could use our wardrobes.  The mind boggles as to what exactly they thought we could do with an empty frame of a wardrobe.  But  soon after the exact same thing happened to a friend of mine using completely different carpenters from another area.

Whenever you complain about how long something takes here in Algeria you are usually given the stock reply ‘Shweya, shweya’ which means little by little, or ‘blaucal, blaucal’ which means slowly, slowly.. and they’re not kidding!  If Muslims were allowed to have a headstone on their grave with an epitaph, mine would read – ‘she died as she lived… shweya, shweya, blaucal, blaucal’.

A house built for pianos

I remember when my Mum and Dad got the heating installed in our home in Ireland many years ago when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.  It was a big, oil fuelled monstrosity that took pride of place in the dining room and the general idea was that it would heat up the whole house, a task at which it failed miserably, especially due to the draughty windows and doors, in those days long before double glazing.  My bedroom was immediately above it and was probably the warmest room in the house apart from the dining room, and even then I managed to acquire chill-blains on my fingers in the winter and had to have an electric heater in there sometimes.  The one good thing for us children was the excitement of the huge oil tanker that pulled up outside our home every few months and the massive big pipe that wiggled its way up through the driveway and the garden to the storage tank behind the house.

A few years ago my brothers built my Mum a lovely, warm, cosy new home on what used to be my Dad’s vegetable patch, and one of them then renovated and moved his family into the family home.  My Mum, at first, thought there would be no room in her new home for her beloved piano, so my brother stored it in his workshop.  But she fretted and worried that it would be damaged by being in such a cold environment, so my sister did some research on the care of pianos and found, to her surprise and my Mum’s immense relief, that pianos thrive in cold environments.  ‘That explains a lot’, said my sister, ‘ the home we grew up in was built for pianos and not for people’.

As a consequence I’ve always hated the cold.  When my first born arrived, the nurse who visited our home after the birth advised me that two heaters on in the tiny bedroom was just a little excessive… I think I was trying to recreate the heat of the womb . When we bought our first, and only, home in England, it had underfloor heating… downstairs, which was wonderful… downstairs.  But it was freezing upstairs.  We installed a radiator upstairs but as it was right under a skylight and at the top of the stairs which lead directly to the front door it was useless. The heating came on at night when the electricity was cheapest, and it did keep downstairs nice and warm all the following day.  I used to make sure that the carpet in the living room was always clean at night before we went to bed, because then I would lay all the wet washing across the floor, and the next morning it would all be dry and ready to put away. Of course it would set me into an absolute panic if the doorbell went and there was any threat of early morning visitors, and  I remember someone who caught sight of  my unorthodox laundry drying system, once asking if we had wardrobes in our home. We finally installed proper central heating and enjoyed a wonderful warm winter… and then promptly sold up and moved to Algeria.

So when we finally found and moved into our home in Algeria, having already spent one winter here, I was so determined that, if we had nothing else in the home, we would have central heating.  We knew nobody who had any as everyone had a smaller, gas version of the one we had years ago in Ireland.  As I found out since then some of the older apartments built by the French do have central heating with the old style radiators that work really well even now.  But most people have the one gas fired heater that is usually installed in the hall, right inside the front door, which, as a consequence, is the warmest place in the home.  When my husband started his search for a boiler that included a timer, he was actually laughed at by some plumbing suppliers.  ‘What do you need a timer for? Can’t you just turn it on yourself?’  He started to wonder if there was such a thing to be had in Algeria, and I told him that, if he didn’t find one, he was designated to be the one to get up in the early hours, long before the Fajir early morning prayer, and turn on the heating to warm the house before everyone else got up.  Eventually, Alhamdulilah, he did find one, and then had the fun of trying to find a plumber to install it. Finally he did find one that was willing to install it despite never having done so before, and who told him afterwards, that working for him was an education. (He should try living with him.... it's more like a blooming university degree!)

It was particularly cold that first winter in our new home, with hailstones and snow (one of the strangest sights I saw that winter was a picture my daughter took of a palm tree near the university in Bab Ezzouar covered in snow), and I told my husband’s family that I should sue him for breach of promise as he had always marketed Algeria as being lovely and warm.  They responded that they never had such a cold winter until I had come so they were blaming me for bringing the cold with me.  So we had our own home, empty as it was (our voices echoed so much that if you tried to talk to someone in one room from an adjacent one, you couldn’t understand what they were saying), but it was warm Alhamdulilah.

Home at last

And then one day on the 9th of August, 2004, Allah guided us to an estate agent who took us to see the outside of a house that really got my heart racing.  The road on which this house was built was a cul-de-sac with the sea at the end, and I could see that there was a space between the house itself and the outside wall so I knew it had some kind of outdoor space!  The agent did not have the keys so we were to come back the next day, which we did, but the agent wasn’t there and his partner was really embarrassed as he had no record (these agents actually kept records of appointments!!!!) of our visit the previous day and didn’t have a clue as to which house we had looked at the previous day.  Instead, to try and make up for it, he brought us to another house, again with the sea at the end of the road.  He didn’t have the keys but could we come back the next day?  Where had I heard that story before?  We agreed, but my heart was still on the first house we had seen and I asked my husband if we could still see it.  He said lets wait and see this one first.  So back we traipsed to the agents (we are talking about an hour and a half’s journey each way here) and he brought us back to the second house.  We went in and around, and then upstairs, and I went out on one balcony and saw the sea at the end of the road and felt myself holding my breath.  We went upstairs to the terrace and I took one look at the sea and across the bay to the El Aurassi Hotel, and thought “I could die happily in this house.”  We got into the car without looking at each other and then my husband said, “That’s it – that’s the house!” There was something about the house that reminded me of our home in England.  My husband said the same, and when Sarah, our daughter,  saw the house she said she knew what I meant but could not put a finger on it. It was so different and so much bigger and yet it had this familiar feel to it.

A few days later my husband brought the structural engineer to look at it and he was really impressed with it alhamdulilah.  Within two weeks of seeing it, we had bought it and two weeks later, just in time to enroll the children in school (as the previous owner hadn't found an apartment, he had nowhere to put all his furniture so we agreed to store it for him in one of our rooms),  we were able to move in – what a record for bureaucratic, paper laden, everything-has-to-be-the-most-difficult-way-possible, Algeria – the biggest importer of red tape in the world!  And that is when our life in Algeria truly started alhamdulilah.

Wisdom often comes with hindsight, and this was certainly the case with our search for a home of our own in Algeria.  The person from whom we had bought our house was an émigré who lived in France, but had bought it as a holiday home for him and his family when they visited Algeria.  He loved the house, but as his wife’s family were all on the other side of Algiers, she found it very difficult staying so far away from them when they only stayed here once a year, so he had decided to sell up.  The amazing thing is that he had only come to the country and put it up for sale just before we came to the estate agents, so this house wasn’t even for sale all the time that we were busy pinning our hopes on the other one in Bou Ismail.  It was as if Allah had planned this house for us and kept us busy with that one and all the other ones that we knew in our hearts weren’t what we wanted, until this one became available.  When people come and visit and admire our home, I always tell them that this was a gift from Allah because I always like to give credit, where credit is due. My husband’s nephew visited and, as he stood on the terrace and looked out at the sea, and then looked to the side across the rooftops to the minaret of the nearby mosque, he marveled as he said to my husband, ‘ you both got what you wanted – she got the sea and you got the mosque’.

One day I stood at the kitchen door and looked out on to our small back courtyard and looked at the honeysuckle that was creeping into our garden from a neighbour’s garden and the rubber plant in the corner.  And I remembered standing at my kitchen door in England looking out at our tiny back garden, and the honeysuckle creeping into our garden from another neighbour’s garden and wondering if I would ever have as nice a small outdoor space as this one.  Subhanallah Allah never takes one thing without replacing it with something greater.  I had had to give away all my cherished house plants including my rubber plant when we left England, and there was one growing in the corner of my little space in Algeria, along with the fig trees.

A house with a view

There were several “near misses” where we saw somewhere and it wasn’t anything that I wanted but my husband would say something like “maybe we could just take it for the moment until we sort ourselves out and then sell it again when we find what we are looking for”.  Usually my heart would sink but I would say nothing, we would think about it and then it would fade away to be replaced by another possibility.  The very first house we saw that helped me to at last visualize a home of our own in Algeria was one right on the sea.  It was old and hadn’t been lived in for a while, and it had a swimming pool that could be filled with water from the sea.  On the first floor there was a veranda that went around the front of the house and looked out over a small beach, and, of course, the sea!  It was so close that the veranda was wet with a mist of water from the huge waves as it was still winter.  The house itself wasn’t really big enough and needed extensive renovation, and there was a little road that went along the house down to the sea and we couldn’t help but notice the beer bottles thrown here and there.  We knew then, that in the summer this haven could easily turn into a hell.

We did find one home after a few months that got me really excited and had me planning how to furnish it.  We brought the children to see it and they loved it.  So that was settled then.  It was even further away from Algiers but that didn’t bother me. The view of the sea was in the distance, but by this stage I had resigned myself to the fact that you could either live right by the sea and not have any  sea view because of  the other buildings around you, or live at a distance on higher ground where you could see the sea above all the buildings.  We just had to wait while the seller sorted out some paperwork.  At last we had an end in sight and we waited, and we waited.  Sarah, our daughter, joined us at last having finished her exams in England,  and we were still waiting.  One day my husband brought a structural engineer to have a look at the house, and he took one look and told my husband to forget it – the builder had obviously skimped on the cement and he said that he thought it was extremely unsafe, especially in an earthquake zone.  We had been in Algeria 8 months and were back to square one.  That was such a horrible time, but alhamdulilah we had found out before we bought the house. We then found another possibility in the same area but when my husband described it to the engineer he said he wouldn’t even bother going to see it.  It had only 4 metal bars sticking out at the top on the terrace, which meant that the concrete was only reinforced with 4 metal bars, and that was 2 bars too little in an earthquake zone. This engineer was the son of our landlord and I am ashamed to admit, that in my desperation, I started to suspect that he just didn’t want us to move out!  I started thinking maybe I was asking for too much and very briefly I reduced my requests in my prayers.  And then I thought that Allah has told us to ask Him for anything we want and He will hear our prayers, and I thought, “I am limiting him astaghfirallah!  I shall ask for everything I want – if I don’t ask Him, who can I ask?”  I used to get up before Fajir to say the night prayer knowing that He was there asking if there was anyone who needed something from Him, and when I lay down at night to put my little one to sleep, I used to ask him to ask Allah for the perfect home for us.

Then I said to my husband “OK we have done it your way, now lets do it mine!”  He had said that it was doubtful if we could find a home by the sea.  I looked at him incredulously and showed him the map of Algeria,  “Are you trying to tell me that with all this coast line” I said as I gestured at the sea all the way from Constantine to Oran, with Algiers plonked right in the middle, “that there is NOWHERE for us to find a home by the sea?!!!!”  “Well I don’t want to live in Constantine or Oran” he said.  “OK, but how about the other side of Algiers?”  We had only been looking on the western side where we lived.  “I don’t know anything about that side of Algiers” he said.  “You mean to say that you went all the way to England, and you are afraid to go to the other side of Algiers, even just to look?”  I asked incredulously again.  So, leaving the older ones very happily at home with Sarah we got into the car and drove around the coast of the Bay of Algiers to the “Other Side!!!!!” stopping at every estate agent on the road.  Admittedly some of them were disasters and I had to learn to keep my mouth shut (a very difficult thing for me to do, but all in a good cause! – come to think of it, I think the reason my husband enjoyed the house hunt so much were those moments of bliss for him!) as otherwise the price skyrocketed.  “Well, I thought there was a house here” said the estate agent as we looked at a cement platform with four pillars.  “But the view is nice” he said.  Yes it is, I thought if you like a view of a motorway with cars careering up and down.  Another one wanted to sell us his home, which was not finished, and he and his family were living in the garage. But we also saw some really lovely homes, but they usually were on the big side with several floors each complete with bathrooms and kitchens and I had visions of my husband’s family all moving in with us!

A home to call our own

Moving to a different country can be difficult at the best of times, but when that country is so totally different in every aspect from what you are accustomed, even with the best will in the world, it can be very difficult making all the adjustments necessary. Yet, I can honestly say that I never once thought of going back – it just wasn’t an option. I just knew that somehow there was a better life to be had here…. if we could just find a home of our own.  Soon after buying our first car, my husband visited his Mum and she told him that a car was all well and good, but that ‘Evelyn won’t feel at home here until she has her own home’. Finding one seemed easier said than done.  We had decided, even before we left England, that we wanted to buy a house that was already built and finished as we didn’t have the patience to buy a plot of land and build our own house.

At first we depended on "word of mouth"- a most inefficient way of finding a property, if ever there was one. I remember one day my husband brought me some sweets wrapped in a twist of newspaper, and as I happily chewed away I idly read the snippet of newspaper and saw that it contained advertisements for estate agents and houses for sale.  I asked my husband to ask his family about this newly acquired information and he was told that they knew all about them but that estate agents were an expensive way of acquiring a house as they often took such a high price for finding a home. Sitting at home and waiting for people to come and recommend homes to us wasn’t getting us anywhere and so, against all advice, we started trawling the estate agents some of whom were rip off merchants its true, but some were really good and helpful. You wouldn't BELIEVE some of the places we saw - from huge monstrosities of homes with 3/4 kitchens and the same number of bathrooms to holes in the ground (literally). Some homes looked as if the rooms were added on as and when they could afford to build them - without any planning whatsoever! And as for the requested view of the sea: So many of the places we went to see did indeed have a sea view - if you hung off the balcony by the tips of your fingers, twisted your neck to an un-natural angle and screwed up your eyes you could just about make out a patch of blue in the far distance between an apartment block and a clump of trees!!

I wanted to live by the sea (if you’ve read any other posts on my blog and seen my pictures, I think you might come to realize what a penchant I have for water of any kind…. sea, river, stream, pond, waterfall, you name it), I wanted to live in a good Muslim area, I wanted privacy and walls around the house and space within those walls for my children to play, but most of all I wanted a home for us all to grow together as a family and to grow closer to Allah.   My husband wanted a Mosque within walking distance.  Was that so much?  After several months I got the distinct impression that people thought it was and that I was too particular. My husband’s nephew told us of the man who came to him to suggest a home for us, and when the nephew asked him if there was a garden, the man told him that there wasn’t one, at which the nephew told him that it wasn’t what we were looking for as we wanted a garden.  ‘But what about the children?’ asked the man incredulously. This puzzled me as I thought to myself ‘but the garden is for the children!’  Then my husband explained that the man’s outlook was based on having a house as spacious as possible so that when the sons grew up they could marry and have the space to bring their wives to live with them. This is one of the many times when I saw the gaping hole that appeared every so often between me and Algerians based on our different upbringing and life experiences.  Holes are good though….honest!

Tea or coffee anyone?

When I was growing up in rural Ireland in the 60s and 70s (yep…. I’ve totally give the game away now!), we only ever drank tea in our home… which was the case in most, if not all, the homes around us.  We had an orange tea-leaf dispenser on the wall and with a push of a button the leaves went into the pre-heated tea-pot and was brought back to the boil and then put on a place mat in the middle of the kitchen table under a tea-cosy to keep it nice and hot.  And so began the endless cups of tea and the constant ‘hot drops’ that seemed to make a seamless connection between dinner and tea time.  We drank it out of mugs (except my Mum who said that tea always tasted better out of a china cup) according to our taste – my Mum liked to give it to us children, fresh from the pot while it was still a little ‘weak’ and then when it had become a lot stronger she served my Dad.  So much of my childhood memories are caught up in those never-ending tea drinking sessions, including all the times my Mum and her two sisters would sit after dinner, when all the family had been fed and left the table, drinking tea and putting all the world to rights.  I can still remember that wonderful thrill of anticipation when, in my bedroom upstairs, studying, I would hear my Mum plug in the kettle downstairs and I would know that tea was on its way!

When we had special guests or special occasions like Christmas and Easter, my Mum would bring out the best china that was kept in the sideboard in the dining room.  She had 4 sets, 3 of which were wedding presents, and she would pull out the extensions in the dining room table, lay the tablecloth  with matching cups, saucers, silver cutlery,  along with side plates, a cake plate and milk jug and sugar bowl. And then she would bring in the home-made scones and buns, biscuits and maybe some left over Christmas cake (which lasted for months).  I love my mugs but I still remember watching and listening to the sound of hot freshly brewed tea being poured into a china cup and can honestly say there is nothing like it in all the world.

It was my sister who first brought coffee into our house and I can remember hating the smell of it.  As time went on, my parents would sometimes have a milky coffee to keep them going if dinner was going to be a bit on the late side, and gradually I noticed that guests were as much offered coffee as tea.  I can’t remember when, in my child-rearing years I started to drink coffee in preference to tea, but a lot of my memories, and that of my children, are connected to coffee.  The times I sat on the kitchen floor on the other side of the counter in the hope of some privacy, while one of the children tip-toed up to me and asked tentatively ‘have you had your coffee now Mum?’, in the hopes that I had materialized into a semi-human being.  I drank endless mugs, often lukewarm or cold, until the wonderful purchase of a microwave.  Then I would look fruitlessly for my half-drunk mug of coffee, give up, make another mug, drink a little, get distracted, find it cold and put it in the microwave to heat it up… only to find the missing mug of coffee.  My eldest daughter still remembers the day I ran out of coffee, with me frantically searching the cupboards for the coffee I was so sure was there… but wasn’t.  It may sound like an addiction, but strangely enough I am not addicted to coffee as I don’t suffer the effects of withdrawal when I don’t have it.  When I fast the whole month of Ramadan, I may drink a handful of mugs of coffee throughout the whole month, if that, and not suffer from headaches or any other physical symptoms of withdrawal.  But I miss the company of coffee – to me it’s like a little treat to myself throughout the day, and I love sharing a mug with friends (such an odd saying that – ‘sharing a mug with friends’ because there’s nobody I love enough to actually share one single mug of coffee with….well ok, maybe my husband if he actually drank coffee and my Mum or Dad if they were still around, and, at a pinch, my children.).  There have been times when my husband has offered me a cup of tea or coffee, gone off and made it, brought it back to me and then sat down…..without one for himself.  And I have tried to explain that it’s nice to SHARE one with someone… meaning that they have one too.  But he just can’t understand why I can’t enjoy my cup on my own, when he doesn’t particularly want one himself.  When he then said that he would compromise and bring in a cup of….. water and drink it with me, I knew that this was one of those cultural battles that should never be waged as there just was no winning side.

For me afternoon coffee in Algeria brought back memories of my childhood and…. the Japanese tea ceremony…. only with coffee instead of tea!  The Algerians don’t have ‘elevenses’ or ‘pick-me-ups’, or in fact any kind of snacks in between meals, which is probably much healthier, I suppose.  If I don’t sound convinced it’s because I love the whole idea of stopping work, whatever the pastime, and having a mini-break with a cuppa regardless of the beverage of choice.  They drink coffee in the morning and again in the afternoon and that’s it.  If there aren’t any guests then it’s a less formal affair, but if there are guests then it’s more like ‘high tea’. For me to serve coffee or tea to ex-pat guests means asking what way they like it, making it in the kitchen and then plonking the mug in front of them.  But in Algeria you have to have: a large tray preferably ornamental, on which you put a set of matching coffee cups and saucers which are usually slightly smaller than the English/Irish tea cups, these are for milky coffee, and then another set of even smaller ones (to my mind not much bigger than a thimble) for black coffee.  With that you also have a matching sugar bowl and another bowl for the teaspoons, some people put water in this and others don’t, along with a serviette holder.  In addition, of course, you need two flasks, again as ornamental as you can find, a large one for the hot milk and a small one for the coffee. Then of course there’s the plates of cakes (usually around 3 different varieties is sufficient) and the individual plates for each person. And… you need all this in duplicate because most of the time you serve the men separately from the women. 

I had a lot of help with my first time hosting a coffee afternoon as my long suffering sister-in-law gave me all the accoutrements for the occasion and I roped in her daughter to be ‘Mum’ and serve the guests.  The second time, I again borrowed all the accessories, but this time I had to do all the serving myself and found myself getting very nervous when the room went quiet and all eyes were on me.  When you’ve sussed out what each person likes, usually ‘nus-nus’, half milk, half coffee, and the right amount of sugar, again, usually 2 teaspoons (I thought at one time that this was almost compulsory in Algeria as I never saw anyone having any less or more than this amount), you then put the teaspoon in the cup and give it to the guest.  On this particular day, however, I took the teaspoon out of the cup and handed it to the guest and was told that I should serve it IN the cup, which goes totally against my sense of propriety as I think it looks a lot better placed on the saucer and then given to the guest.  I then had to admit that I didn’t have enough teaspoons to go round.  The next week my husband’s sister-in-law turned up with… two packs of teaspoons, one from her and one from my husband’s other sister-in-law, and she admitted that she didn’t want to give me the other set as she wanted me to think it was only her that was being thoughtful!  When I thanked her for them, I told her that if I had known that was the effect my not having teaspoons had on them I wished I had mentioned that I didn’t have enough jewelry either!

I have been here long enough now for my husband’s family to all be ‘trained’ to ask me if I want a coffee at odd times of the day, and, if we’re out visiting together they will often ask for a ‘boule’ for me, conjuring up images in my head of a massive bowl, but instead, I am given a mug, usually retrieved from the display cabinet and dusted off and washed first.

Home is where the heart is

One of my favourite streets in Algiers

Soon after we arrived in Algeria my husband started a business with one of his nephews and his friend and the van we had brought over was appropriated in this new venture.  This business was our only source of income for the first few years and kept us going until we had found our feet and settled down in the country.  Every time I saw the van I thought of my Mum and her kindness and thoughtfulness to us, and wished I could have painted ‘Sally’s van’ across the side!

In April 2004, 6 months after moving over, my husband planned to go back to England, and, at the very last minute (literally 24 hours before) decided I should go back with him.  I felt awful telling his sister that we were going as it meant that she would have to take care of our 11, 8 and 5 year olds while we brought the 3 year old with us.  I told her that I had no plan to go and that, in actual fact, I had planned to give the flat a good spring clean while my husband was gone.  She laughed and commented on how that’s what she and most Algerian women would be planning if their husbands were going away for a time.  I promised the children that I would wake them up in the morning even though we were leaving very early, but when I went into them the next morning and saw them all sound asleep I just couldn’t find it in my heart to wake them.  I kissed them and then left the flat to find my sister-in-law standing outside her flat.  I asked her to tell them that I was sorry for not waking them but that I had kissed them and that I loved them, by which time both she and I were sobbing on each other’s shoulders.  Of course…. her tears may have been at the thought of having to take care of them for 10 days!  But I don’t think so… she’s very soft-hearted mashAllah!

 My daughter came over for a break during the Spring holidays, and, if I had planned it to be THE most disastrous holiday ever, I could not have planned it better.  It rained for most of her stay, the electricity kept going off, she and a couple of her brothers contracted a stomach bug that confined them to bed for a few days, her sister then contracted chicken pox and the back windows were stolen from our brand new Kangoo car.  As a treat, towards the end of her stay, we brought her and her siblings to Khemis Milanna, a good hour’s journey from where we were living, to see friends who owned a Pizza restaurant. I admired the beautiful scenery as we drove down while my car sick daughter sat in the back and muttered something very non- complimentary about me sounding like Heidi.  When we arrived and finally sat down to eat, the pizza had a drizzling of olive oil over it which my daughter hates, and we ended up laughing at the catastrophe her holiday had become.  It was either laugh or cry.

On the last weekend I urged my daughter to start packing early and not leave it to the last minute, as I knew the family would all be around to see her before she left.  She burst into tears and said that she didn’t really want to go back to England.  You could have blown me down with a feather.  I had resigned myself to her going back to England and never wanting to come back, and was flabbergasted at her outburst.  She then explained that, when we talked about moving here, and then, after we had done so, she could not see us having the same family life that we had when we lived in England.  She remembered her holidays here and had loved it but couldn’t translate that to actually living here.  But the one thing that this holiday had shown her was…. we were still a family and still lived as a family exactly as we had in England, complete with all the chaos that involved.  Home really IS where the heart is, and it’s people who make a home, not bricks and mortar.  I told her that she didn’t need to go back if she didn’t want to, and, after thinking about it, she decided to go back for the last term to finish her ‘A’ levels.  It was so hard to see her off at the airport, but it meant that when she finally did move to Algeria a few months later, she came happily looking forward to her new life, without any doubts in her heart.

Change

Les Falaises, Jijel

What I remember most about those first few months is feeling cold all the time and the rain.  We had no heating at all in our flat until my mother-in-law took pity on us and gave us a heater, which was the type commonly used throughout the country – a gas fired heater with a large flue to the outside and a small window where you could see the flame.  There was already a niche in the wall in the hall for one so it was just a case of getting it installed.  The Algerians have this notion that a heater is not something suitable for a living room and so they plonk them in the one place where they are not needed and are the most inefficient – in the hallway just inside the front door.  This is the one area that is the warmest and yet is the furthest away from the living and sleeping areas, and if you have unexpected guests they may well be greeted with a few lines of damp washing drying in front of it, as soon as they enter your home.  We had no furniture other than our bed, chair-beds for the children, a few chairs and a computer desk, and we didn’t want to buy anything until we had our own home. 

We had arrived just before Ramadan and my long suffering sister-in-law and her daughter cooked for us for the whole month, after which we went out shopping for a fridge, cooker and washing machine.  We went to an area named Hamis, notorious for the sale of all kinds of electrical goods, which my husband told me had sprung up without any authorization and which had become so successful that the authorities could do nothing but leave it evolve.  However it extended its control by refusing to do anything useful like putting in pavements so it was a fun place to visit in the winter, if you liked looking like a mud-pie.  My first impression of the town was that it reminded me of a town in the Wild West straight out of a cowboy film.  There was a straight road and on either side a line of buildings of varying heights with shop signs advertising their wares.  My other sister-in-law came with us and I was fascinated by the fact that, while I was caked in mud from the hem right up to my eye-balls, she, without any apparent effort on her part, had hardly a spec on her, even her shoes looked clean!   She insisted on buying us the items we wanted and so, at last, I could start to take care of my own family again.

The thing about change is that it brings out qualities in you that you never knew you had, and some you could quite happily have lived to the end of your days without knowing.  I am an introvert, and, although I almost always enjoy myself on most social occasions, I don’t actually care if I don’t see or talk to people from one end of the month to the next.  Yes… I know… I’m odd.  And yet, I found myself wanting to get out and about and go visiting, and really looking forward to any excuse to get out of the flat, something that was totally alien to me.  Looking back I’m sure it was psychological – I still wasn’t driving in Algeria at this stage, and even if I could I didn’t know how to get anywhere, and I had nowhere to go because I hadn’t made any friends of my own. Our home was temporary so it didn’t really feel like home to me, and I think I felt confined.

Having my sister-in-law nearby meant that, whenever she had guests, they invariably popped in to see me too.  Both of our kitchen windows looked out over the building’s front steps and car park so we could see people coming and going, and whenever I saw someone coming to visit her I went into panic mode and raced around trying to make the flat semi-presentable.  I am not, by any means, a slob, but I never quite learned the knack of cleaning the whole flat every day just in case of such an eventuality… mainly because I just couldn’t be bothered.  I remember one day when I saw someone coming and did my usual headless chicken routine only to see them go off again without coming anywhere near my door.  I stood at my kitchen window, not with the relief you would expect, but instead, with hands on hips I wondered indignantly why they hadn’t come over to see me!  The human mind is an amazing, and, in my case, a contrary marvel.

 One of the very first things that my husband did was to get the phone line that was already installed, re-opened and then to get me an internet connection.  This was very rare in households, and cyber-cafes were very popular where you could go and sit at a terminal and pay for an hour’s internet access.  So it was a real luxury to have it in my home and we paid by the minute. But it was wonderful for me, and helped me to feel more connected with the rest of the world, and especially my family and friends. (This was long before Facebook I hasten to add)  I remember the first time I rang my Mum, she was so happy to hear from me and was so amazed at the fact that the line was so clear. 'I can't believe you're in Africa... you sound like you're in the next room!'  Before we had our own phone-line the only connection was through my sister-in-law, which made for some awkward phone calls between my husband's family and my own.  My sister told me of one ‘conversation’, using the word in its broadest sense, she had with my husband’s nephew where they both thought they could have a coherent conversation if she talked as loud as she could and he replied with ‘okay’ to everything she said.