The Name Of The Farm

An Inspiration, A Joke, And A Jab

So many people have asked where the name of my farm came from, and the answer isn’t all that simple, but it has been twenty-five years now and I suppose it’s time to tell the story. Enough of the people involved have died of old age at this point.

During the 80s and 90s, while I was mostly being a mom, spending some time as a teacher, and getting into writing, my late husband was building an empire of sorts. I had loaned him a copy of Merchants of Grain by Dan Morgan in 1980 while we were in Khartoum, a book that fascinated me and inspired him. He successfully made a breakthrough in the offloading of grain in the port of Alexandria, Egypt, and then built the grain terminal at Dekheila (National Stevedoring) from the profits, going on to start a trucking company, a regional airline, and finally building National Vegetable Oils in Burg al Arab with financing from a number of Egypt’s larger banks. During his last year, he reorganised his companies in Canada and Egypt with the eye to anticipated profits from National Vegetable Oils, and when he had done so he came home one day to tell me that he had named the company with which he was working on the Chicago Board of Trade Al Sorat Trading and the other one that was constructing the factory Al Sorat Investment. I am not a particularly religious individual, but I was shocked. As people have since pointed out to me, the spelling of the name is a bit off. It should be Al Surat, which means “the path” referring to a line in the Fatiha that talks about “the path of righteousness”. The Fatiha is the opening of the Quran and it bears an astonishing resemblence to the words of the Lord’s Prayer in the Anglican church. Somehow, I was not comfortable with the fact that business and religion were being mixed. After telling me this, he just gave me one of his smiles and rushed off for a meeting. A few months later, not knowing what else to buy him for his birthday, I purchased the domain name of www.alsorat.com, but he never used it.

In June 2000 my husband died in an accident while flying himself home from Germany. He made a successful emergency landing in his Beechcraft just north of Cairo but a low concrete wall in the field were he landed was just tall enough to push his head into the roof of the cockpit. It killed him instantly. Later that day a group of the major banks in Egypt and the head of Cargill Europe appeared at my doorstep with a question about whether I happened to have 250 million USD on hand. It was not one of my good days. A few days later when the banks had gone into a flurry of activity I joined them in the board room of CIB where I discovered that the banks had made a terrible paperwork mistake. They had loaned my husband 250 million USD to build National Vegetable Oil’s factory on land owned by Al Sorat Investment in Burg Al Arab, and I knew that it was approximately 98% finished…but rather than make the loan agreements out to Al Sorat Investment, which was the company that owned the land and the factory, the banks had made the loan agreements to Al Sorat Trading, a company that had a rented office and owned a couple of computers, and whose primary asset had been my late husband’s brain. This was an awkward situation, but I had bought a car before in Canada and I had negociated a mortgage on a house there, so I, at least, was aware of the importance of collateral, even if the banks seemed not to be.

There were a number of amusing items that came to light during those days while the banks were having heart attacks. One of these was the fact that some of the executives of these banks still believed in Mr. Oriac. When my husband had first established his company in Canada with a friend, a great deal of time and whiskey was spent on trying to come up with a good name for the company. About halfway through a bottle, our friend came up with Oriac. It was short, it sounded nice, and it spelled Cairo backwards. Oriac it was. But when we moved to Egypt and my husband’s successes started mounting up, the bankers, and possibly some of the other business types as well, presumably decided that NO ONE could manage all of that on his own, so clearly my husband had moved to the US (which he did not), had married the daughter of his wealthy boss who worked in the grain trade (although MY father was a civil servant who retired long before we were married and know nothing at all about grain or business) and had been set up in business by Mr. Oriac… despite that the name Oriac appeared no where in any of our papers. When we heard about this preposterous story, I contacted my godfather in California, since my father was long since deceased, to ask him to make a professional photo and to send it to us in Egypt. This photo was hung in one of the offices in Alexandria, and when anyone asked who it was, someone would murmur in hushed tones, “That is Mr. Oriac.”. I was actually asked whether the story of Mr. Oriac was true by one of the bankers, and I simply burst out laughing. I had never realised that people actually believed it.

To get back to the nuts and bolts of the story of where the farm got its name, I spent three years of my life watching roughly half a dozen banks perform what was probably the first debt/equity swap in Egypt’s history, in the process of which every single thing that my husband had created was either given to the banks or stolen by a number of his friends who bankrupted the few of his companies that the banks were not interested in. I was smart enough to see which what the wind was blowing so basically, I resigned myself to the fact that I would be broke at the end of the operation, while the banks would have covered their backsides and very probably made some money selling the grain companies to Cargill International. The last thing that I wanted was to waste more of my life on those businesses while my children were in the US going to universities to start their lives, and many people were surprised that I was staying in Egypt, although I really had little or no choice in the matter. At the end, I had the home that he and I had purchased under Canadian joint tenancy law, which meant that it was mine now, the house that we had been occupying in Maadi, a house in Sharm el Sheikh, and my in-laws’ appartment in Heliopolis…all shared 75%/25% with my brothers-in-law. As soon as the banks no longer needed my daily attendance, I sold my house in Canada and decided to buy land just north of Abu Sir, an area that I had known for a long time and where I felt at peace.

I had begun working in equestrian tourism not long after my husband died, having realised on a 10-day trip in Mexico with friends in 2001 that equestrian tourism didn’t have the be the terrified gallop through the desert on a half-trained horse in Giza that most tourists experienced in Egypt. I had about fifteen wonderful years taking visitors through the villages and deserts of Egypt between Abu Sir and Dahshur, the best years of my life. During that time, I decided that the reference to the path of righteousness was definitely NOT meant for business, but for the rides that I was sharing with friends and clients. Al Sorat was meant for the farm, and as many Arabic speaking friends have told me over the years, it isn’t even spelled correctly in transliteration for it to be the path from the Fatiha…but what did I know as an illiterate foreigner? As time went on, changes in the country have meant changes in the farm, from equestrian tourism to education and now as well to a space for learning and healing for both people who live in Egypt and those who find themselves here willy-nilly. As I mentioned before, it has been twenty-five years since my husband died and I was put through that absurd dance by the banks to save their faces…and the other end of their anatomies. If I had been utterly suicidal, I could have simply told them that I was sorry about their loans, but the company in question couldn’t cover them. I would never have gotten any money out of it, I’m sure, but their reputations would have been destroyed and it was a very shakey time in Egypt’s economic history, so I would have ended up in prison. I simply didn’t see the point of it all. Life is too short to play in the mud. I have to wonder whether my late husband was aware of the verbal joke in the spelling and use of the words he used for his companies, because he never explained anything when I objected to them initially. In the end, whether it was intentional or not, the name served as an inspiration and guidance for the last 25 years of my life, while at the same time I have been happy to know that every so often the banks who gave me such a miserably few years due to their incompetency have had to see the name that cause them so much trouble. It is small but pleasing.