Desperate Serbwife

The sprawling squalor of Cairo (part 2)

One of the things that most surprised me about Cairo is the incredible level of poverty found in all areas of the city. In many ways, Cairo has the potential to be an ideal tourist city: beautiful weather, fascinating old town, developed riverwalk, cultural curiosities, museums and the indescribable pyramids.

However...For those traveling outside an air-conditioned tour bus, Cairo is also a chaotic mass of humanity and poverty which has the capacity to overshadow most of its positive features. How do I begin to describe the teeming mass and squalor that is Cairo? Let's see...The air is so polluted with car exhaust and dust that some areas, like the Black Triangle around the Cairo Museum, have registered air lead levels at 10 times the permitted level allowed by the World Health Organization. The water is completely undrinkable and I think hygiene is simply a suggestion, even for some of the waitstaff at nice hotel resturants.

To top it off, as a foreign woman, I constantly felt like the locals viewed me as some kind of tramp because I didn't have my head covered (which I'm sure was mostly in my head since the locals are quite used to female tourists without head coverings, but it was certainly uncomfortable looking so different from all the other women I saw on the street). It just struck me as extremely strange that two (straight) men can walk down the street holding hands lovingly but a woman feels uncomfortable wearing a T-shirt. This, I know, is simply a different in culture and shouldn't be judged negatively any more than I should be judged because I chose not to wear a headscarf. However, when rating the appeal of a tourist destination, one needs to consider the level of comfort in interacting with the locals (I fully expect some reader to tell me off for these views, but I'm just telling you how I felt).

But I have to say, the worst part about Cairo is the constant request for baksheesh (tips) in return for just about anything, from pointing to an open cab that is at the front of a cab line to simply ripping your ticket at the entrance of a museum. Now I understand that this is how business is done and everyone should be out to make a buck, but after awhile, you begin to think that the Egyptians see you as walking dollar bills rather than a human. The only time this didn't annoy me was when the cutest little boy who was probably about 3 years old, that clearly lived on the street with his mom, came up to me with this grubby little rose to sell to me. I am such a sucker for cute kids selling things that I emptied my pocket of all my baksheesh money (yes, you have to keep a special pocket for it because you have to dole it out so often) just so that hopefully he and his mom could buy something to eat. He just looked so sad and hungry, I couldn't help but buy his rose even if it was starting to turn black around the edges. This feeling of compassion for the street people of Cairo ended quickly however as we crossed the bridge across the Nile on the way back to our hotel and passed two young street boys (about 14) who had just dropped a scared little puppy into the river from the bridge and were giggling while they watched it try not to drown. It also didn't help that as soon as we got to the other side of the bridge a group of three women and their babies all started walking around us asking us for baksheesh while we held our hands over our pockets in case they went for them. They followed us for a block asking for money until one asked for the rose instead - which I gladly handed over in order to get them to leave us alone.

We arrived back at the hotel still disturbed by our experiences of the past 20 minutes. The human reaction to poverty in Cairo made me realize how different poverty can be. Four years ago Mike and I visited a tiny village in Ghana in which the local villagers had made a tiny tourist attraction out of the fact that a bunch of monkeys lived in the trees throughout their village. They built a thatched-roof hut for tourists to sleep in and had a local woman cook dinner for any tourists that showed up. Mike and I had been the first tourists that had visited in four months. This village was extremely poor - no vehicles, no running water and only a couple of hours of electricity per day. But they were so lovely to us, and seemed welcoming and happy. They kept their village immaculately clean by combing the dirt around their houses to ensure that there was no litter and taking turns to clean the village latrine. Now I know that some of this was a show put on to impress us and get us to give them good tips, but it was one I could appreciate and was happy to give them all I could for their excellent hospitality.

Those villagers were definitely living in poverty, but why were they so much kinder than so many of the poor people that we met in Cairo? I have come to realize that it's not the poverty that turns people callous and mean, it's living in a squalid city where there are so many forgotten and uncared for people. This forces people to compete for the same scare resources. In the village, people still help each other out even if no one has much to give, but in the city, people become desperate and lonely (not unlike the richest cities in the world).

That feeling of desperation and angst was evident in the eyes of many people in Cairo. I didn't feel bad for them and I certainly wasn't driven to want to help them. I just felt like I wanted to get away from most of them and hide out in our hotel where no one was asking for tips and people treated me like something more than baksheesh. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of wonderful people in Cairo who would be embarrassed by this aspect of some of their countrymen, but those people didn't seem to be employed in the tourist industry.

It is quite a shame because I think that Cairo has a lot of potential - and I can't emphasize enough the majesty of the pyramids - but the baksheesh artists have certainly turned off these two seasoned travelers (which I believe is quite hard to do seeing as we consider a trip to a poverty-stricken African village a vacation).

posted by Brooke @ 11:51 AM