Much Too Much in Cairo...

Spring has finally arrived in Cairo and with it comes heat and sandstorms. The wind can kick up sand at any point during the year, but the spring brings a special kind of sandstorm known as the Khamsiin. During the Khamsiin, temperatures can rise very quickly and the wind can blow up to 70 miles an hour, which means that the sky turns orange and everyone scrambles for something to cover their nose and mouth so that no one chokes on the sand. The Khamsiin are named such because Khamsiin season lasts 50 days (khamsiin=50 in Arabic), and conventional wisdom says that it is the 50 days between Easter and Pentecost.

Sand isn't the only thing one is in danger of choking on in Cairo. The pollution that sits over the city can also become quite oppressive, especially, I'm told, in the warmer months. Many, many days since I arrived in Cairo, the haze that envelops Cairo has significantly lessened visibility...and the ability to take a deep breath. The Egyptian Parliament recently passed a law mandating that all taxis that are more than 10 years old must be off the roads by 2010. This will help. The city also has a new fleet of yellow cabs (as opposed to the ubiquitous black and white ones) which run on natural gas and have meters that actually work--something you won't find in any of the black and white cabs. They're more expensive for short trips, but for long trips, the meter is much more convenient than haggling with a cabby over how much he ought to get paid.

Too much sand...too much pollution...too many people. This is Cairo right now. Though if only you knew the statistics, you'd think the idea of "too many people" might sound a bit preposterous. You see, there's a one million unit housing surplus in Cairo. That's right--one million unoccupied residential dwellings in a city of 22 million people (give or take a million). So how on earth can there be too many people and not enough places to put them if that's the case? Well, it's all a matter of income. Most of those one million dwellings that are vacant are in upper-middle class and upper class neighborhoods, many of them in the new suburbs popping up to the east of Cairo. Most of the folks needing housing would favorably be considered lower class--most people would call them dirt poor. And they have nowhere to go. So there are illegal slums all around Cairo where the apartment buildings are only half finished, but inhabited. And if that's still too expensive, there is the City of the Dead. There are actually several cities of the dead around Cairo, and the total population of people living there is 5 million by some estimates.

The Christian community of Cairo is an interesting dichotomy when it comes to economic privilege and living conditions. On one hand, many Copts are very well-to-do and have achieved great success in Egypt and internationally. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former secretary-general of the United Nations is an Egyptian Copt. However, Egyptian Christians also occupy the other end of the economic spectrum. While they don't live in the Cities of the Dead, they do occupy one of Cairo's most famous slums--Garbage City. Garbage City sits in the Moqqatam hills, due east of Islamic Cairo. The Zabbaleen (Arabic for garbage collectors) who live there are predominately Christians who relocated from Upper (that is to say southern) Egypt in the mid-20th century. They collect a third of the city's garbage and recycle an impressive 80% of what they do collect. However, their living conditions are quite bleak. Garbage City earned its nickname (its official name is Manshiyet Nasr). The Zabbaleen quite literally live with the garbage they collect. Their children sort it at schools, their women sort and recycle certain types of garbage to be sold at the craft store in Garbage City, and their pigs eat any of the organic refuse they collect.

As one might expect in a community so impoverished, faith plays a very important role in the lives of the Zabbaleen in Garbage City. At the top of the hill in Garbage City are three churches, literally carved out of the rock. While Tiffany was here, we visited Garbage City and got to see two of the churches there. The churches themselves are fairly unadorned on the outside, but when you get inside, they are truly impressive. The largest of the three is the Church of St. Simeon, which can hold 20,000 people in its auditorium. The other church, the Church of St. John and the Virgin Mary is actually more visually interesting in that it has painted murals of Coptic icons on the stage. Both Tiffany and I decided that we would love to see a service at either church sometime with the huge sanctuaries full of people all praising God.