Anafora - December 28

I don't write much about what I am doing here because I am not doing much! I mostly lie around and read, sleep and meditate (picture of my room and terrace here. Note the icon I purchased on the wall to the right). I feel like one of those patients in the old movies who go to the Alps and lie in the sun to recover from whatever is ailing them. This is okay because this is what Anafora is about, I have been told. You make it into whatever you want (except, I suppose, an amusement park or disco). This is why there are no brochures or web sites about the place. They don't want it put into a box and labeled. Anyway, it is too hard to find a label. It is a home for an order of sisters (Catholics would call them "apostolic religious sisters," but the Copts refer to them as "deaconesses"), a working farm, a guest house, a retreat center, the center of a vigorous parish, and much more. Most of all it is a community.

The sisters all started by coming from the Bishop's home parish of El-Qussia to help serve the visitors and some expressed the wish to stay and form a community of sisters. Today there are about 10 sisters and there are more young women who want to move here than there is room for. Apart from their religious fervour, some explanations for the girls' coming is the lack of gainful employment for them in their hometown and the absence of marriagable men due to many migrating for work to other Arab countries. The sisters cook for the community, paint icons that they sell, make organic soaps and jams (fig, hibiscus, bitter orange) and oils and sewn articles that they also sell to support the community. They also run the farm together with farmworkers who also live on the grounds with their families (about 2.5 km in diameter).

In addition to the sisters and guests, there is a parish priest named Father Cherubim (who looks like a baby angel with a beard!), and a priest-in-training, Father Ismael, who is doing his 40-day practical study before being sent to El-Qussia to serve his parish. This parish chose Father Ismael, who is an engineer by training, as a person who they wanted to be trained as a priest and serve them. The 40 day training should be done in a monastary but Anafora also "counts," again showing the special nature of this place in the Coptic church. A couple of Swedish women also live and work there, one of whom helped to found Anafora, and one of whom has recently converted to the Coptic Orthodox church.

Then there are the guests, who come from all over the world, some to seek peace and rest (like myself), and some to come for a night or two on their way between the pyramids and the monastaries of Wadi Natrum (which is just a few kilometers away).