Sitting amidst a small group of men under a street light at three in the morning, fiddling with a small cup of excessively sweetened tea, I held the hot drink with both my hands to shift as much of the warmth as possible into my fingers. The cold march night was windy and unforgiving as we chatted away idly in an alley way coffee shop in a run down part of Cairo.
The area is Deer Al-Malak, which is famous for it's Masr We El-Sudan Street, where a collection of shabby shops and restaurants entertain many people from the surrounding areas in the evenings, but that is not where we were. We were somewhere between Al-Mahroosa Street and Tereat Al-Gabal Street, in an alley way coffee shop which had its creaky wooden chairs strewn across a craggy and cracked pavement under a lonely street light in an otherwise pitch-black alley. The occasional car squeezed past our group and the opposite wall in an unsettling manner.
I sat amidst three physicians, an engineer, a social worker, a hostel owner, a self-employed worker, and a pasterma businessman, all in their mid twenties. As promising as the titles seem, only one of the physicians had a steady low-paying job along with the engineer, and the hostel owner and pasterma businessman seem to be breaking even for now. All the others had more free time in their hands than they had hoped for.
Although the official figure for unemployment usually varies between 8% and 14% each year according to government issued statistics, the figure can't be any farther from the truth. As university graduates are starting to be available in droves, the number of jobs attainable are few in comparison, and the competition is high, even for jobs with low pay and no progression.
'That man over there was supposed to find me a job in the petroleum industry about a year and a half ago' quipped the self-employed worker. He pointed behind me. Half of us turned around and burst out in laughter as a tall, bald middle-aged man with a paunch urinated in the middle of the alley with his pajama bottoms dropped around his ankles. The laughter soon died off as he described how the man used to be a figurehead in a government run Petroleum company before he lost his job and subsequently became mentally unstable. The sad story came to an end when the man who had been relieving himself earlier came towards us and stared at us for a few moments before moving back into the shadows of the alley.
As the sun was about to rise, we stood up and the social worker insisted that the bill was on him. As much as we tried to resist this, he wouldn't let us pay a single pound. We all shook each other's hands before parting in different directions, some into the sunrise, and some away.
A typical Cairo coffee shop, with traditional handmade wooden chairs and various decorations of little value hung up on straw covered walls in the Al-Abassia area.
The area is Deer Al-Malak, which is famous for it's Masr We El-Sudan Street, where a collection of shabby shops and restaurants entertain many people from the surrounding areas in the evenings, but that is not where we were. We were somewhere between Al-Mahroosa Street and Tereat Al-Gabal Street, in an alley way coffee shop which had its creaky wooden chairs strewn across a craggy and cracked pavement under a lonely street light in an otherwise pitch-black alley. The occasional car squeezed past our group and the opposite wall in an unsettling manner.
I sat amidst three physicians, an engineer, a social worker, a hostel owner, a self-employed worker, and a pasterma businessman, all in their mid twenties. As promising as the titles seem, only one of the physicians had a steady low-paying job along with the engineer, and the hostel owner and pasterma businessman seem to be breaking even for now. All the others had more free time in their hands than they had hoped for.
Although the official figure for unemployment usually varies between 8% and 14% each year according to government issued statistics, the figure can't be any farther from the truth. As university graduates are starting to be available in droves, the number of jobs attainable are few in comparison, and the competition is high, even for jobs with low pay and no progression.
'That man over there was supposed to find me a job in the petroleum industry about a year and a half ago' quipped the self-employed worker. He pointed behind me. Half of us turned around and burst out in laughter as a tall, bald middle-aged man with a paunch urinated in the middle of the alley with his pajama bottoms dropped around his ankles. The laughter soon died off as he described how the man used to be a figurehead in a government run Petroleum company before he lost his job and subsequently became mentally unstable. The sad story came to an end when the man who had been relieving himself earlier came towards us and stared at us for a few moments before moving back into the shadows of the alley.
As the sun was about to rise, we stood up and the social worker insisted that the bill was on him. As much as we tried to resist this, he wouldn't let us pay a single pound. We all shook each other's hands before parting in different directions, some into the sunrise, and some away.
Hi there. I found your blog through another I watch. I only see two entries though. Do you plan on writing more? If so, I look forward to reading them.
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