Egypt-based blogger Maryanne Stroud Gabbani started blogging in 2003 at the age of 54, after becoming frustrated with trying to answer people individually regarding how it was that she was so happy living in a place that the news said was so opposed to “western women”. She figured that hopefully a blog would reach more people and give Egypt a human face and has never looked back since. Following is our interview with her: Q. Who is Maryanne Stroud Gabbani? What are you doing in Egypt and why and when did you start blogging? A. I am an American emigrant to Canada (during the 70's) who met and married a Sudanese/Egyptian emigrant to Canada while we were both grad students at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario. My late husband was my connection to Egypt and the fact that his businesses were keeping him in Egypt more than in Toronto after our kids were born was the reason for moving to Egypt. I got tired of shoveling the snow alone, I guess. I also had the odd notion that it was better for children to see their father once in a while. Moving to Egypt was entirely my idea and Diaa was actually quite against it as he could see that there were definite material advantages in living in Toronto. Our children were attending an excellent private French school and we had a lovely house in Etobicoke, but it just wasn't quite right, so we agreed to try living in Egypt for two years starting the summer of 1988. The family voted to stay in Egypt before the end of the two years. We lived in Alexandria for the first five years and then moved to Cairo as the demands of my husband's businesses dictated more and more time in the capital. We lived in Maadi to be near the American school where we transferred the children from a French school in Alex, Ecole Champollion in Ibrahimeya. As Canadians, we figured that they needed a bit of both languages and cultures, and as Egyptians they were quite settled in the new country, partly because we didn't travel back and forth every year like many ex-pat families. Instead, we spent time exploring Egypt, Europe and the Mediterranean. The kids only got to know North America again when they were getting ready to go to university. I think that we got the internet in about 1996 or so, and I immediately began searching for email groups for riders/horse owners. I had two mares at Sakkara Country Club at the time and I was looking for more information on horse care and training. I found a group for general equestrian interests and another for endurance riding, two groups that I still belong to over ten years later. It was the administrator for one of these lists who gave me the link to the famous Baghdad Blogger in 2002/3. I'd never heard of blogging before and I was struck by the immediacy of his writing from Iraq. At that point I was relatively newly widowed when my husband was killed in a flying accident, and my kids were in New York at Columbia University. In fact, both of them were there the morning of 9/11 and I was the one who called them from Cairo to warn them to stay on campus as we had no idea what was going on there. The endurance riders (an interesting group of lunatics who think that it's fun to ride 50 to 100 miles on horses) had contact with the Gulf Arabs because the families of Dubai and Abu Dhabi had taken up endurance in the 90's, and by some weird fluke I had found myself the manager of a 120 km race that was Egypt's first international endurance race sponsored by Mohamed Maktoum in the spring of 2000, just before my husband's death. I was the only person on the organising committee formed in Cairo for the race who had even the vaguest idea what endurance was, though it was entirely academic and my friends abroad helped to coach me through the ordeal. Some of the endurance people had visited Dubai for races and they had a lot of questions following 9/11 regarding my life in Egypt and the lack of conformity between what they were seeing in the media about the Middle East and what they'd experienced. I can't count the number of times I was asked, “But how are you, a North American woman alone, coping in that country that is so anti-western?” and I got sick of answering individually. That was when I decided to start writing my first blog, Living In Egypt. My goal was to talk about ordinary day to day boring life in Egypt so that people could see that it really wasn't all that different from other places and that it really wasn't so scary. I had no idea that I'd still be writing it four years later. Q. How many blogs do you maintain? What are they? Can you briefly describe each one of them and explain why you set it up? A. I now have three blogs, Living In Egypt, which is still about just that.