Day 183:

It has been six moons since I began work.
I have become a robot. I am efficient. I work well.
I arrive.
I clean.
I cook.
I care.
I depart.
This has become my life.
I am to be married soon to a man in my village. He has no money or property but my father has agreed to allow us to stay in his house until we find a place to live. He works every day from dawn till dusk at the pyramids making bricks and hauling them up to be cemented into to a monument for Pharoah.
It makes me feel ill.
The monotony of it all.
There is nothing new in life. There is no hope left. There is nothing to look forward to. I cannot even be excited to be married.
My work has eaten the life from within me.

Day 32:

It has been one moon since I began work.
It is difficult, but not quite as hard as it was when I began.
My mistress is still stern and cruel, but it no longer affects me as much. She has a right to hate me. I am a Hebrew. I mean nothing to anyone. I have been told it is a dirtiness of my blood.
Mother gave birth to another son weeks ago and they took him and killed him. They grabbed the tiny baby and threw him off a cliff into the Nile.
There he floated for a few moments until he sunk to the bottom of the Nile.
It took only minutes.
Mother could not bear herself. We watched from behind the reeves nearby as they tossed him carelessly down. As if they could not hear an infant screaming.
Mother tried to drown herself with him.
I did not let her, though for a moment I thought I might try to drown with her.
What is this life?
I once felt this flame of indignation burning within me. I still feel it warming me at times, but I fear that the light is flickering. It has lost fuel and is almost gone completely. I am so scared. I do not want to turn into a machine.
I want to feel.
I want to hate.
But sometimes it is just too tiring.

Day 2:

We are slaves.
There is no way to sugar coat it or make it seem another way. We have officially become slaves. I had my first day of work with my master. She is stern and proper and bitter all the time. I can only address her as Ma'am. She wouldn't even tell me her real name.
She made me scrub the floors until they shone, muddied them up again and the scolded me for not cleaning properly. Then, I needed to look after her children, cook supper for eight, and tidy the kitchen, starved after a full day's work, watching them eat the food I made for them.

I was hungry and exhausted and it was late in the day, and still she made me stay and work and prune the garden and wash the pots and pans and knead the dough for the next days bread, and bring her more water from the well, and feed all of the family's eight camels, and polish their hooves...

Enough is enough! I don't know how much more of this I will be able to take!

My poor father and brothers have the worst of it. They spend their days in the fields making clay bricks for Pharoah's next pyramid....I don't know how they can bear it without breaking out into a fight or a protest.

I myself am on the brink of exploding.

Day 1:

So, hi there universe...my name is Mira, daughter of Chava and I am a Hebrew living in Egypt. Today there was a proclamation that our rights to pay have been revoked. My Father said that he had seen this coming. In the past years more and more changes have been made and we have been given fewer and fewer rights and now we are slaves. There is no kinder way to put it. I never thought that my life would be this way. Tomorrow I begin work as a maid in an Egyptian general's home. I don't know what his wife will be like or what their house will look like or how I will be treated.

As soon as this new Pharoah came to power and denied the acts of Joseph I had been concerned. How could he just choose to forget the things the Joseph, our ancestor, did for Egypt?

As concerned as I am, I'd like to be hopeful. Maybe there will be a good thing from this. We are not necessarily slaves...we are being given work from our leadership...that is a good thing, right?