Cairos's Solution to Three Major Problems...

Day two was filled with contrasting views of modern Cairo. We took a tour no tour bus would have scheduled with a woman, one of Kathy's friends, who sees hopeful signs for the future where alone, we would have only seen chaos.

Getting Around..
We started by meeting other friends and loading into two cabs for the ride to the Moqattam or Garbage City. Some of you might remember that name from news stories a month or so ago about a huge land slide that covered homes and killed lots of people - same area, different place.

Getting there we experienced Cairo's first solution - too many cars. With bumper to bumper traffic, there are no rules. No stoplights, no respected on-way streets, no lanes, no crosswalks, NO RULES! Traffic moves with very few traffic jams... Our drivers acted as a tag team, filling (or wedging) into tiny empty spaces and creating space for the other. Traffic is like bumpercars with big trucks, tiny cars, buses and mini buses jockeying for position, cutting in front or behind, careening up semi empty streets regardless of their one-way designation, nosing into traffic honking, braking, accelerating; than add the masses of pedestrians. M.J.. our guide said that up to 70 pedestrians A DAY are killed in Cairo! The injured are dumped into the next available taxi because ambulances would take too long. This is an Islamic country and perhaps a deeply held belief in a better life after death, and belief that Allah will end your life when He's good and darned ready and not before contributes to this lack of concern.

Garbage City..
, we made it to Garbage City, which is Cairo's answer to what to do about the mountains of garbage produced everyday in a city of probably 20 million people. The problem has turned into an opportunity for the Coptic Christians, not a highly regarded segment in an Islamic country.
The Coptics gather the garbage from throughout the city and return it to their homes in Moqattam. Garbage City is a warren of narrow, dirt streets running randomly between multi-storied buildings which are homes/workplaces/shops/garbage recycling areas. Families use the ground floor for sorting and recycling even the smallest shred of styrofoam. Reprocessing doesn't happen here, so the Coptic's receive a small percentage of the benefit of this massive recycling effort. The first thing that hits you is the smell, then the visual assault of the tons of garbage stacked in heaps waiting to be sorted. Then you notice the piles sorted by type, and the organic matter being picked over by goats, pigs, cats and dogs. Then you see the scores of people living their lives; working, socializing, showing off new babies, young couples holding hands, children playing in the streets, old people sitting in doorways observing. And it dawns on you that no single stereotype can describe what you're seeing. This is a bustling community with its own set of problems and successes sitting on the garbage of Cairo.
The Coptic Church has several huge sanctuaries cut into the mountain above the city itself, and on Sunday afternoon many families had gathered in the clean, well maintained open spaces around these places of worship to socialize and play. The church has beautified the area with huge relief sculptures of biblical stories which are cut into the cliffside - all done within the past 10 years.
We tried to shop at the recycling center, a place where women sell their creations made out of recycled products, but it was closed. I may return later with M.J.

City of the Dead
Then, it was on to City of the Dead, the northern cemetery. Cairo is thousands of years old, and Muslims don't cremate, so it could become little more than a giant cemetery without a solution. The tradition is to have underground family burial chambers with rooms above for visitors to stay while visiting the dead. This tradition is thousands of years old. The rooms above have become homes for tens of thousands of people. For active burial sites, the family living above acts as caretaker for the grave. The one we visited was a three room home, a kitchen/entryway, a living room with overstuffed furniture and a bedroom.

Access to the underground burial chambers is in the courtyard behind. Burials take place within 24 hours of death, so the caretakers are notified by the grave site owner, and they clear the sand and rocks in the courtyard that fill the stairway to the underground chamber. There is a room on the left for males, and one on the right for females. Shrouded bodies are laid out on a slab and the tomb is resealed. Hopefully burials don't happen too often, because it takes about 3 months for a body to dessicate. When the space is reopened, the caretakers roll the bones up in the shroud and stack the remains. Each site holds more than a thousand bodies! So a small space, probably no more that 15'x50' offers living space for a family above and burial space for thousands below.






Al-Azhar Park
This is Cairo's one and only public park, build on a previous garbage dump. It is gated with one entrance accessed by taxi only... and there is a small entry fee which means that the poor are out of luck. Be that as it may, M.J. talked about how wonderful to have a place where children can run in the grass, and people can sit among green things. It is hoped that more of these parks will be cropping up in other areas of the city and that the poor will begin to have access. We strolled by fountains, pools, gardens beautifully lit in the evening. We had coffee at the huge beautiful park center overlooking Cairo and listened to the call to prayer and watched the sun set - amazing sight. Could just barely see the pyramids - pollution is terrible.



Tomorrow it is off to see both an upscale and middle class view of life in Cairo.