A Room With A View

The team has arrived safely, without any lost luggage or mishaps.  Along with the GV Egypt personnel, we pile into a mini-bus for a five-hour drive south to El Minya, following the Nile the entire way.

Hundreds of empty buildings crowd the outskirts of Cairo; windowless red brick developments with dangerous looking prongs of rebar pointing northward on each corner. 

The unfinishedness of the houses, Egypt Style as it’s known, is preparation for the upper floors that will be built once sons and daughters are married. Land is often tenured, staying in the families for generations.  Because of this, Egypt builds up. 

This explains a lot of things, especially the fact that ancient Egypt was uncovered from years of windswept sands and towns built entirely of mud bricks that consistently collapsing onto itself, forcing the inhabitants and subsequent relatives to move on top.

Our local coordinator explains that most of the vast construction is being built by developers hedging against the market, using the economy’s decline to hire cheap labor and then hoping that it will surge again so that they can sell these spaces at a premium.

Structures closer to the city are part of a failed government initiative to provide affordable housing, but city officials didn’t count on the expense incurred by construction and thus, the pricing to purchase proved to be beyond the means of the people who actually need the housing. 

With 17, 000,000 in Cairo (that’s 200,000 per square kilometer), you can imagine the need for affordable housing.    Children are literally being kicked out of their homes since parents cannot afford to pay for both rent and mouths to feed, leading to a new statistic of 1,000,000 homeless children in the city itself.

*Just to give you a comparison, there are 10,000 people per square kilometer in New York City, population 11,000,000.

Pictures cannot accurately describe the sprawl that continues on and on throughout our drive, I try to think of ways to describe this vast acreage of empty windows that stare out like jack-o-lanterns and metal fingers stretching up towards the sky. 

At the Hotel Cleopatra, the front desk manager assures us that we have a beautiful view, but when we open the shutters and throw up the sash, I discover that our room faces two unfinished apartment buildings with a narrow alleyway leading down the bank.  “I want to see the Arno” I sigh, remembering Lucy Honeychurch’s words upon hearing that her room promises a view as well in E.M. Forester’s classic.   

We will be sequestered here for the three and ½ days, not a typical time frame for any Habitat build, but Egypt is unique in that the villages where we are working are combinations of Coptic Christian and Muslim, both religions having non-working holy days beginning Friday and ending on Sunday.

More so, however, Egypt remains a police “state”, and because of the terrorist bombing in 1995, requires all tourists to be accompanied by armed guards.  Tourism fuels a major portion of the economy, with 14,000,000 visitors expected this year alone.

With us at all times is the swankily dressed Omar, packing a Colt .45.  With a beam in his smile, he proudly tells us that he was on Obama’s detail when he spoke in Egypt last year.  I can tell that he’s picked up a thing or two from the Secret Service by the way he leaps off the bus while it’s in motion and clears the street before we exit. 

A Toyota truck with at least six armed soldiers on benches follows our bus to and from the hotel, although we never see these men until our last day when a gaggle of kids, home from school, crowd around the team wanting pictures and touching everyone; a bustle of noise rising to a hundred gleeful shrieks and giggles and causing much agitation to the soldiers and the village security men, clad in matching galabayas, who start waving long, thick canes in front of the children, causing them to scream and back off, only to return to their excited state a few seconds later.  Soon after, Omar orders the street cleared and we are on our way back to safety of the mini-bus and the long ride to Cairo.

It's Two AM, Do You Know Where You Are?

On these international journeys, I’m always seem to arrive in the middle of the night stumbling after other bleary eyed fellow travelers through brightly lit and impossibly white customs counters, exiting out into the gassy glow of orange municipal lighting and the combined smell of smoldering embers from city incinerators and roadside trash disposal, diesel and leaded fuel, dusty streets. I love it. 

You bump along to some hotel where the staff is surprisingly wide awake, crash into a bed that you hope is comfortable, knowing that you will wake up in a city you've never visited before and a whole new experience that will forever mark your life and give you memories to later dream on.  

If you expect The Four Seasons on these Global Village treks, you are on the wrong voluntourism trip.  I've stayed in bunk beds four across in a crowded cabin, cement block hotels with armed guards and bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling to shabby chic hotels, remnants of some grander era of the ‘60s… which is where I find myself on the morning of October 9^th in Heliopolis district of Cairo. 

Prevalent in this Mother of all Cities are sand particles that breeze in from both sides of the Nile where the desert stretches on for miles.  It adheres to cars, buildings, your feet and turning white limestone buildings brownish yellow of silt and dust. 

My first mission after getting rousted out of bed at 1:30 pm is to locate the “Cilantro” coffee shop our coordinator has suggested directly across the street from the Hotel Baron.  Not in her detailed account of arrival procedures and neighborhood conveniences was the life threatening street crossing. One has to cross two wide streets separated by double trains tracks in a shallow ditch.

I’m determined. I get my New York on, hold up my left hand first and dance between cars and motorbikes and tour buses, gingerly hopping down to the train tracks that separate the two boulevards, then climb up the other side and do the same thing all the while clutching my laptop and looking directly into the driver’s eyes as I do my same little dance to coffee. 

Although there don’t seem to be any streetlights in this part of town, in downtown sections of the city, crossing lights display a green man running in a quick animation as if this has always been the way to get to the other side.

Before leaving, Cairo: The City Victorious was recommended to me via 43Places.com.  The history is astounding and everywhere I look, I try to match the words to actual locations. There so much to write about Cairo, but I am anxious to talk to you about the build and so I will save that for later.