Discover Cairo – Life in Egypt behind the hotels

The city doesn’t have a general sewerage (sewer and water). The buildings of the wealthy people have their own systems; the same for the businesses and hotels. These represent less than 30% from the total of the constructions. The rest … to the potty with them. What happens with the potty? It empties in the back of the house. Many houses have a small shop to the ground floor and at the upper floors people live there. The potty is tossed from the window.

The city doesn’t have a sanitation service. One from the city hall. And there is no garbage hole, somewhere at the edge of the city. There is only for the wealthy man, small businesses, or the ones which pick the garbage and toss it on wastelands. So what are poor people doing with the garbage? The same thing they do with the potty. They toss them behind their houses. When the situation gets insupportable someone tosses a cigarette or a match and in a few hours the garbage space is “cleaned”. In this way we found out why there was smoke between two houses and people were staying calmly only two steps away from the burning garbage.

The poor people’s houses are made from bricks of clay dried in the sun. Almost 10 years ago it rained in Cairo and it rained for a couple of hours. The city was drowned by the waters for two weeks until the water evaporated, because there are no channels. The shops and the houses were flooded, every one of them being built at the same level as the ground and without a base. Bricks were just placed on the ground.

But all this is not something a tourist will see. The route a bus has in the city has no connection with these areas. We gave to the driver 1 Euro from each one of us so that he could take us there after the guide told us all that. It was his salary for one month. The car was going slowly and we were shockingly looking on the window – we weren’t able to photograph anything because it was devastating what we were seeing. We were looking at them as calves but the poor ones were looking at us as they were looking at some aliens. They rarely had the opportunity to see a car on the narrow streets, on which not once we were close to kick some exposed “merchandise” in front of the houses. We didn’t went off the bus and we also didn’t open the windows … or else we would’ve died gazed.

The guide was saying that she had the opportunity to see a dead camel in the Nile … after a week when she came back in the city with another group, the camel was still there.

For more read the next post: “City of the Dead”