both to make money for the monastery and as a type of daily meditation. Two of the most common skills employed by the monks were rope making and basket weaving. Even Macarius the Great, founder of Egyptian monasticism, was a skilled basket weaver who trained other monks how to weave. These two jobs were prevalent because there were numerous marshes around the Scetis valley to provide the raw materials. The monks would either take their finished products to the church on the weekends to be sold, or sell them to camel caravans when they passed by their cells. The Apophthegmata Patrum mentions other jobs monks carried out such as copyists. Many monks, including early church leaders such as Macarius the Great and John the Dwarf, worked as day laborers at local farms during the harvest season. These labors served two purposes. They provided the monks with the means for survival in the desert where food and supplies are not easily available, and they were also a kind of manual meditation that gave the monks time to both work and reflect on the Scriptures. Church controversies in early Skete communities The early church was fraught with controversies that bitterly divided many cities and even congregations. The earliest monasteries of the Scetis Valley predated many of these early church schisms and because of their isolation and because most of the monks spent so much time in isolation, these church problems were slow to affect them. For example, during the great persecution of Christians under Emperor Decius, many early Christians fled to the desert to the monasteries; the long arm of Rome did not extend very deeply into the Scetis Valley. The creation of martyrs during this time influenced the way the Skete monks were perceived because the extreme asceticism of the lifestyle led many to believe the monks to be living martyrs. Later, during what would become known as the Melitian Schism when the church became divided in Alexandria over who was the rightful bishop, local monasteries around Alexandria would choose sides and enter the fray, but Scetis monasteries only mentioned the problems in passing. The isolation of the desert and that of the monks themselves kept many of the bitterest church controversies at bay. As mentioned earlier, Saint Macarius was briefly exiled to an island in the Nile river over a disagreement concerning the Nicene Creed, but the exile was short-lived