Where it says
Galha tooreilee mash
The passing bull came to her

Weil toor ma nayeimhash
And the bull didn’t put her to sleep

In fact, it is not “toor” meaning “bull”. It is “door” meaning ..(sorry cannot be translated in one word). It is a flu or sickness that goes around. Therefore “el door elle mashy” means the sickness that’s running around. As in, a contagious disease.

“We el door manayemhash” means the sickness didn’t allowe her to sleep.

So, after the show  we were sitting in the lobby bar with George Dabaie; waiting   for the crowd to leave. Sitting at a table next to us was Ahmed himself.  George introduced us to him and we broke into song, singing his famous song “Salametiha   om Hassan”. He laughed and then started talking to George.   Next thing we knew George was furious, yelled at us to get up and hurry   and leave. He was bright red with anger. We thought he was mad at us because   we had embarrassed him by singing in front of Adawiya. We started apologizing.  He said, no, he wasn’t mad at us, but we had been insulted and if we weren’t   there he would have gotten into a fight and beaten him up. We said, what  could be so bad. He didn’t want to tell us. We begged and nagged until he   said, that Ahmad thought George was a pimp and had offered some money to  him “to  spend some “time”   with us. We asked, “how much did he offer and I think  it was some paltry 50 bucks or something. We said for all three of us or  each. When he said for all three , we said, no wonder you were mad, let’s   go back and kick his you know what. At that point, George realized we weren’t  in the Middle East, we were Americans, and we are hard to insult!! He ended  up laughing. 

Second Adawiya story.
 Our very good friend Leyla had a heart attack and was in Stanford Hospital.  When Marsha, Amy, and I went to visit her she was completely sedated in a  deep coma so that she would not move and ruin the fabulous work that her  doctors had done. We were so scared and didn’t know what to do. We asked  the nurse that was on duty, sitting on a high stool, if it was okay if we sang a song to her. The nurse looked at us weirdly and said she thought it would be okay if we were really quiet.

   So, there was a little stool next to her bed, I stood on it and put my arms around Marsha and Amy and we sang every so quietly but with great  conviction the “Salametiha Om Hassan” song. It is basically a song about   someone trying to cure his mother’s headache and he tries all kinds of folk  ways. Later, when Leyla was fully recovered and we told her the story, she   swears that she heard us and that it helped her recover.
Oh, yeah, here’s a third  story. There was a tacky little restaurant on Market street in the Tenderloin  area where some of us danced. One night I was walking two friends back to  their car and we were standing on the sidewalk talking. A very strange man  came down the street talking to himself, he was dirty and disheveled, and  had wild hair. He started ranting at us. I just ignored him, but the other  two gals were starting to get spooked and started looking vulnerable. The  crazy man got louder, so I did what came naturally to me and I started singing “Salametiha” with  all the gestures of throwing the demons out. The crazy man recognizing  that he was up against someone crazier, walked around us and down the street as fast as he could.

Linda
San Francisco, CA