Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
Nov 25 – Dec 1, 2004
Way to go
It is now eight years since an innovative programme was set up in
Sinai to preserve and nurture the heritage of a local community.
Jenny Jobbins reports on the St Catherine’s Bedouin project
St Catherine’s new Visitor Centre
THIS IMAGE of the Archbishop of Sinai drinking tea with Bedouin in
the garden of the Monastery of Saint Catherine by Bruce White is
one of many unique photographs that grace a new publication from the
American University in Cairo Press. Saint Catherine’s Monastery: Sinai,
Egypt — a Photographic Essay is a handsome book on the Greek Orthodox
monastery and its buildings containing many newly-commissioned colour
photographs. The concise and informative text by Helen C Evans is
preceded by a special introduction by His Eminence Archbishop Damianos
of Sinai, abbot of the monastery. (Published by the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. Distributed in Egypt by AUC Press)
Egypt’s national parks were set up primarily to protect the country’s
natural heritage. St Catherine’s, however, is also safeguarding a
historical and social legacy. The St Catherine’s Bedouin project is
centred at the small village near the famous monastery. It happens
to be the only town or village in Egypt to fall within a national
park, and its advantage of location places it in a special position
vis-ˆ-vis conservation.
When the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA) established St
Catherine’s as a protected area, it found itself guardian not only
of the mountains of Sinai but also of the village that had grown up
round the Greek Orthodox monastery, largely peopled by the monastery’s
Bedouin servants and their dependents. Dozens of smaller settlements
also fell within the new park. And like the natural heritage which
the EEAA is fighting so hard to protect, the cultural inheritance
of the South Sinai Bedouin is under threat from the changes brought
about by modernisation and global shrinkage with its consequent influx
of tourists.
St Catherine’s National Park encompasses virtually all the mountainous
area of South Sinai, from the Taba-Mitla road in the north to the
borders of the Ras Mohamed National Park in the south, and from the
inner rim of the coastal plateau in the west to the Taba, Nabq and
Ras Abu Galum Managed Resource Areas in the east and north east (in
all the protected areas encompass 30 per cent of South Sinai). Its
establishment in 1996 came some time after the foundation of the
Ras Mohamed National Park, but while attention there was focussed
on ecosystems and aspects of protecting the coast and coral reefs
from mass diving and recreational fishing, it was realised that
St Catherine’s not only enveloped a stunning landscape and local
biodiversity, but also a huge number of prehistoric sites and a local
population whose way of life was under threat.
The St Catherine’s covers an area of 5,750 squared kilometres, or
20 per cent of South Sinai. It contains Egypt’s highest mountain,
St Catherine’s (2,624 m), as well as Mount Sinai — held sacred as
the place where Moses received the Ten Commandments — Mount Serbal,
Mount Um Shomer and Mount Tarbush. The mountains are composed of
igneous rock between 500 and 1,000 million years old — one of the
most violent periods of activity took place in the Pre-Cambrian era
about 800 million years ago. The towering granite crags overlooking
St Catherine’s Monastery are some of the oldest in the world.
The mountains enclose wadis (dry valleys) studded with acacias and
other vegetation, while higher in the rocks are clefts where water
gathers seasonally, forming pools and nurturing the variety of herbs
and desert shrubs from which the Bedouin draw nutritional supplements
and medicinal remedies. Forty- five per cent of all the plants in
Egypt are found in Sinai: of these 320 species 19 are unique to Sinai
(including a native primrose) and more than 100 have a medicinal use.
Wildlife includes the Nubian ibex, Dorcas gazelle, Striped hyena,
Red fox, Fennec fox, Wolf, Wild cat, Sinai leopard, Rock hyrax,
Rodents, Geckos, Skinks, Hedgehogs and Hares. There are 46 reptile
species, 15 of which are found nowhere else in Egypt, among them
two species of snake, the Sinai banded snake and the Innes cobra,
which are found only in the National Park. There are 150 species of
migrating birds, including about 40 raptor species. Sinai is also
home to the smallest butterfly in the world, the Sinai Baton Blue,
half the size of a fingernail and confined for eternity to the top
of one mountain since it cannot live below a certain altitude, and
its tiny wings cannot carry it as far as the next peak.
The growing popularity of the Red Sea coastal resorts and their
proximity to the monastery has resulted in increasing numbers of
visitors. Protecting the natural and cultural values of the area was
a primary goal in the declaration of the park. A parallel aim was to
enhance the quality of local tourism by promoting its environmental
and cultural aspects.
There are more than 500 historical sites and buildings in Sinai,
dating from the round stone nawamis built about 4,000 BC to structures
from the Bronze Age and Nabatean, Byzantine and Islamic periods. There
are abundant foundations of tombs, houses, storehouses, animal traps,
and evidence of copper smelting. The sites have yielded Bronze Age
jewellery and amulets and tools and pottery from all ages. In 2002
UNESCO declared St Catherine’s a World Heritage Site.
Visitors have long been drawn here. Overlooking the village is a
palace built by the Khedive Abbas II and still used as an official
rest house. Each day 1,000 people visit the St Catherine’s Monastery,
and it is hoped that the new Visitor Centre will encourage many of
them will pause there to learn more about the park and its resources.
To maximise public access, the centre has been built on the main road
close to the village. Designed by architect Hani Manyawi of Adapt
Egypt, and built in local materials by local labour, it is housed
in seven small buildings modelled on houses left in the area 2,000
years ago by Nabatean forebears. The simple buildings in local stone
blend both architecturally and spiritually into the surrounding crags.
Built into the complex is a model of the base of a Bronze Age house,
a small circle of large, flat stone slaps up-ended; these would have
been topped by poles supporting the upper walls and a roof of wood
or palm fronds.
The Visitor Centre took a year to build with funding support from the
EU. Entry is free of charge up to the end of the year, after which
it will cost three dollars for foreign visitors and three pounds
for Egyptians.
Mohamed Nada, a member of the EEAA’s enthusiastic and knowledgeable
team and administrator of the park’s Visitor Management Programme,
guided us round the Visitor Centre. The first of the six small halls
is the Reception room, which offers an explanation of the aims of
the park. From there a path leads to the Geological hall, where we
learn that the Red Sea cleft began to form 25 million years ago,
tearing Sinai from Africa, and that it still widens at the rate of a
centimetre a year. A fascinating geological column in the hall gives
geological timelines and a stylised representation of the rocks,
including the grey granite which formed 800 million years ago and
red granite from 200 million years later.
Birdsong erupts as the door of the next hall is opened. This section
features wildlife, including the Baton Blue Butterfly, and shows the
workings of the camera traps the EEAA has placed in the park. The
trap mechanism triggers a flash — a literal shot in the dark — and
have captured on film among other animals Ibex, Gazelle, Ruppell’s
sand fox, the Fennec fox and Striped hyena.
Local history is featured in another hall, and the Monastery in
another. Here a model of the complex is painted in pastel shades to
represent the periods of construction. A sanctuary was originally
founded here by Queen Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, on
the spot considered to be where Moses came across the burning bush
— the supposed bush is carefully tended in an inner courtyard. The
monastery was built 200 years later — between 527 and 565 — by
the Emperor Justinian to house the remains of St Catherine, who was
martyred in 315 in Alexandria but whose perfectly preserved body (a
sign of her holiness) had only recently been found on the summit of
the nearby mountain which afterwards bore her name. St Catherine’s
may be the oldest continuously inhabited monastery in the world, and
is the second largest repository for illuminated manuscripts after
the Vatican. The collection contains some 3,500 volumes in Greek,
Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Slavic, Syriac and Georgian. In
the early part of the 11th century the monks escaped the persecution
of the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim by incorporating a small mosque into
the complex.
The Bedouin cultural hall contains photographs, costumes and musical
instruments illustrating the lives led by the members of the local
communities. Most of the Bedouin in the area belong to the Jabaliya
tribe, whose original members were installed by the Emperor Justinian
to guard and serve the new monastery. The main local occupation now is
tourism. The Jabaliya and other Bedouin work as tour guides on camel
safaris, one reason why they are keen to preserve their wild animals,
birds and flora.
Local knowledge works both ways. Since the visitor programme involves
the local community, it enhances their awareness of their locality and
this proves useful when they are guiding visitors or archaeologists.
Many members of the community, such as the Community Guards, receive
a salary from the EEAA. The park also employs a dozen rangers from
various backgrounds ranging from a geologist through an anthropologist,
biologists and entomologists to a business studies graduate. They help
run the Bedouin Support Programme, which comprises nine sections:
health, veterinary services, community guards, traditional crafts,
the acacia programme, dam construction, the wildlife and botany
monitoring programme, visitor management and the awareness education
programme. In just one example of the project’s effect, the landscape
management plan — which incorporates the dam construction and clean
water projects — has successfully reduced the number of stone quarries
in operation from 72 to 24.
About 7,000 people live around St Catherine’s. While the largest
number belong to the Jabaliya tribe, others are from the Muzeina,
Gharaja, Sawalha, Aligheit, Awlad Said and Beni Hassan. All are Arabs
— that is, coming originally from the Saudi Peninsula — apart from
the Jabaliya, who were brought to Sinai from the vicinity of Macedonia
in the sixth century to provide security and service to the monks at
the new monastery. Over the generations the Jabaliya married members
of other tribes and gradually converted from Christianity to Islam,
but continued to work at St Catherine’s Monastery.
The park’s founders believed that a sustainable project must have a
built-in source of revenue, and that local support was essential. The
EU’s then representative, John Grainger, deemed it important to
ascertain the Bedouins’ needs, and in 1996 members of the seven local
tribes assembled for a meeting with environmentalists to discuss what
role they might play in the new national park. They asked for dams,
health care, and a women’s craft centre.
The health programme has proved extremely beneficial. A doctor with
a mobile 4×4 clinic travels to all 77 settlements in the park in
rotation, visiting each one every 45 days. Under the women’s health
education programme, women from each settlement are trained to train
others in community nursing and health care. Each representative is
responsible for the rest of the women in her settlement. The veterinary
programme has also proved effective in the care of livestock. All
camels are now inoculated and numbered.
The dam construction — through which rain water is chanelled and
collected to minimise wastage — and acacia rehabilitation projects
involve a large local workforce. Acacias have been so over-harvested
that the lush groves pruned of dead growth for firewood are a thing
of the past. With the aim of regenerating this essential resource,
seeds are collected and, once generated, are replanted in chosen
spots. So far 34,000 seedlings have been planted.
The medicinal plant programme — funded separately by the United
Nations Development Project (UNDP) –runs in cooperation with the
EEAA in growing medicinal plants for local use. Training is given in
cultivating, packaging and marketing the plants, while at the same time
Bedouin and ethno- pharmacologists cooperate in correlating indigenous
knowledge. Fifty-five families work on the acacia and flora programmes.
“The Bedouin themselves are natural conservationists, it’s part
of their heritage,” says Youssreya Hamid, an anthropologist with a
Master’s degree in sustainable development from South Bank University,
London. “They have a system of alliance through which they protect
wild plants and animals. They will close a certain valley for three
to six months to prevent grazing until it has regrown, to respect
sustainability. The health, craft, human and animal medical and acacia
programmes have all been well received by the Bedouin.”
Bedouin are also occupied in tourism, from running and guiding camel
and wilderness camping safaris to operating accommodation services.
These include five hotels, two main tourist camps and the St
Catherine’s Ecolodge, also built to a Nabatean design and run by a
Bedouin cooperative under EEAA supervision. Twenty-six experienced
Bedouin work as Community Guards, policing the wilderness to watch
out for infringements of EEAA rules.
Of all the projects at St Catherine’s, perhaps the best known outside
the park is the women’s cooperative. The 40 women who were initially
involved started with traditional items such as scarves, beading,
necklaces and sugar bags, but gradually they modified these ideas
into fashionable, marketable items. In 2000 the traditional programme
became a separate project under the name of Fansina. Now 350 women
are marketing their handicrafts here and internationally. They still
prefer to work with the raw materials at home in the time-honoured way.
British textile artist Sally Hampson was involved from the very early
stages. “My job was to see what the women were already making and how
they were accessing materials and selling their projects,” Hampson
says. “What was happening was that the women would make things and
the men would be working close to the people at the monastery and
taking tourists on treks, and they would sell them the things the
women made. It was all very ad hoc. When this programme was set up
the women showed a desire for support in their textile production.”
Hampson’s job was to assess what was going on and find out how the
system worked. She had to become acquainted with the crafts including
some unfamiliar to her, such as beadwork.
“The most pressing need they had was accessing materials, and because
of where they were they depended on passing traders — men selling
household goods and sometimes carrying wool and sewing thread. The
women were in the hands of what these vans had on board. The variety
and quality wasn’t there. It seemed important to give the women access
to good quality materials, like colourfast cotton.”
Some of the first items they sewed together were the embroidered sugar
bags they made for their husbands, sons and brothers to take on their
trips into the mountains to graze flocks or gather herbs. The bags
were of white cotton and had a little inside pocket for the tea. “They
drew their inspiration for their embroidery from their surroundings,”
Hampson says. “They stitched little desert plants, camels and other
animals, stars and the sun, fish and flowers, both stylised and
abstract. Tourists wanted to buy them, and it evolved from there.
“I was trying to get them to work with good materials but keep the
narrative. For tourists this becomes part of the story they bring
home — it isn’t just an anonymous bag.”
Everything the women made had a reason and a purpose. “It’s not
that they can just knock up this and that. I was very cautious about
not dictating the design. I know I had things to offer because as a
Westerner I had sensibilities for the people who buy this, so I was
trying the bridge the two. But for myself, I want something genuine.”
A Bedouin woman’s dress is a sign of her social standing, her hairstyle
of her age or marital status. Every unmarried Bedouin girl, for
instance, sports a lock across her forehead, but this is substituted
by a plait in an elderly woman. Married women of the Jabaliya tribe
wear a black shawl ( Al-ghurna ), unmarried girls a white one ,
( Al-malfah ). A married woman wears a long face veil ( Al-burgah
), a bride a short one until she has had her first child. In North
Sinai women wear an open veil, a beaded breastplate ( Al-mallab ),
and metal accessories given by her husband in the first months of
her married life.
Hamid stresses the strong position held by women in Bedouin society.
“From my point of view women are equal to men,” she says. “Each has
her own job, and the women keep their own money.”
While the craft programme has brought new economic strength for the
women, the health programme has also brought benefits, improving
maternity services and reducing the infant mortality rate.
Hamid, a native of Alexandria, has worked at St Catherine’s since 1998,
taking a year off to study in London. She also teaches environmental
education to children at the 30 primary and local secondary schools
within the protected area. As part of the educational programme, a
traditional healer teaches the children how to find, recognise and use
plants. Bedouin knowledge is thus being used to protect the natural and
cultural resources of the area, and transferred down the line. “Being
forgotten because of the interaction with other cultures would be a
tragedy,” Hamid says. “It needs to be transferred to new generations.”
In eight years the EEAA’s care and intervention has meant a great deal
to the area, and the local Bedouin are backing the programme to the
hilt. The village, though founded on the pickings of the monastery,
has taken up a mantle of its own.
However St Catherine’s Park is constantly growing and taking shape.
The national parks recently made the transition from EU to Egyptian
stewardship, and one of the services disrupted by the changeover has
been the Bedouin-staffed mountain rescue service, temporarily suspended
because of logistical use of equipment, notably mobile phones. But
the park staff see such blips are minor. “The programme is working
well, and it serves as an inspiration and a model for similar areas
in Egypt and elsewhere,” Nada says.
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