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| UCLA Dig House, Tunis |
Today was devoted to taking care of the bureaucratic side of
things.
W. set off alone with a stack of
security forms and about twenty xeroxes of each project member’s passport to
conduct the “opening of the work.”
That
means she had to go to the local authority and claim her inspectors and show
them the site where we’ll be working.
Yes, this takes all day.
Not
because the site is so far away or that there is so much to do, it’s just that
things take a long time to do in Egypt.
Besides
insh’allah (God willing), the word I
have heard the most is
bokra (tomorrow).
Generally speaking, the inspectors are to keep tabs on the project and
make sure they aren’t doing anything illegal—e.g. digging where they do not
have a permit, not reporting finds, etc.
We have a total of three inspectors, two of which are women.
This is unusual, but W. is happy
about it because these women are very eager to learn about archaeology and she
hopes it will help get more Egyptian women involved in archaeology.
Tomorrow will be a scouting day in which we
go out to the site and decide which of the most promising locations to focus
our attentions.
Call time is 4:30 a.m., and we’ll leave at five
sharp for the police station, where we will pick up an entourage of security
guards.
After that, we will not be
without them.
It is their job to protect
us, but they also hinder the work because the easiest way to protect us is to
keep us at the dig house.
So, each day
will begin with an argument because they won’t want to go out into the hot
desert—especially since W. plans to do two field days in a row.
That is, we’ll leave the dig house early in
the morning, work all day in the desert, sleep in the desert, work the next
day, and then return to the dig house and take the next day to do
paperwork.
This is a pretty
ambitious plan, but we’ll see how it works out.
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| Our laundry and the mosque next door. |
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| Camp |
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| A view of camp from the roof. My tent is in the lower right-hand corner of the picture. |
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| Our driveway |
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