They call me “baba”

[I know I am probably never gonna hear the end of this…]

This is a culture that respects age. An older woman is shown a great deal of respect. An older man, even more so.

When a group of people are together and deal with someone else outside the group, say a waiter or salesperson, you can see the waiter/salesperson scan the group. He/she will then address the senior looking man in the group.

Even if the senior person in the group attempts to defer to someone else, the natural tendency is to continue to deal with the senior male.

If it is a group of just women, the senior woman will become the de facto spokesperson. There is also some interplay of class involved. Dressing nicely here gets you a lot more respect. It would be interesting to observe a group of people made up of a poorly dressed older gentleman and a well dressed younger man to see who got the nod as spokesperson.

Anyway.

So, we went to the White Desert over Thanksgiving. There were 4 of us. Kaddee, E, R and myself.

Kaddee still looks like her high school yearbook photo in age.

E is a woman of about 25 years. 🙂

R is a man that looks about 18. I think he is around 29, but he looks very young.

So the 4 of us climb in a bus and head to Bahariya.

We arrive and are met by Ahmed El Shymy, our bedouin guide. He scans the 4 of us. You can see his eyes go from person to person.

He then turns to talk to me. Throughout our weekend with him and his guides, I was constantly consulted to make sure i was happy. No decisions were made without my consent. I would turn to the group for consensus but the final say was clearly mine.

I got “dibs” on shotgun in the vehicle. I got served tea or food first. It was odd. It was amusing. It also became somewhat tiring.

So after the first night, the bedouins start referring to me as “baba”, which is, literally “papa”. It was said with a great deal of good humor and meant as a sign of respect.

They also sat around the campfire on the second night and made up songs about baba jack who was freezing cold and huddled under blankets trying to make up for a lack of sleep the night before.

Funny bedouin bastards.