Egypt, Umm al-Kafkawiyya...

Saturday morning, at Kasr el Aini hospital in Garden City, Cairo.

(In Arabic) “I would like to see a doctor.” Woman at the door: “3rd floor”.

First two elevators don’t work. Third one around the back does. Long hallways with old, dirty tiles. Follow the red arrow to the Out Patient Clinic. End up in Radiology. Follow the black arrow to Neurology. End up in Out Patient Clinic. See hallways full of people in niqaabs and gallabiyas. Realize that this is probably not the hospital my friend recommended. But I’m here and it hurts, so let’s keep going.

Room with a secretary and eight other people trying to give her paper slips in different colors.

“I would like to see a doctor.” “Room to the left, pay first.” In the room to the left. “I would like to see a doctor.” “What for?” Shit, forgot to look up the word for kidney. Point at my back. “Your back?” “No, inside.” “Your stomach.” “No, the other side.” Why can I only remember the word for liver? Shall I try that? No. Turn around, walk into the hallway. Cry. Receive an sms from a friend; “Everything ok? You need anything?” “Yes, the word for kidney!” “Kelya, plural kela.”

Back to the room to the left. “I would like to see a doctor for my kidneys.” Pay 75 pounds. Get a pink paper on which I have to write my own name in Arabic. Back to the room with the secretary. My name is entered in a big book. A nurse takes me by the hand, walks me to the end of the hallway, sits me down between all the other people and tells me to wait. Many people come and go in the room that says ‘kela’. Forty minutes pass. Lady to my right who smiled at me twice suddenly pushes me through the door when two guys come out. Friendly doctor who speaks English diagnoses a kidney infection. Writes down seven lab tests/ultrasounds she wants me to have done. Prescribes insanely strong antibiotics.

Laboratory is on the 1st floor. Walk down. Find the reception, hand over the paper. Get a white paper. Across the hall to the cashier. Pay 92 pounds. Get a green paper. “Go to the computer.” Guy behind the computer gives me my original paper with some stickers and my name transliterated from Arabic back into English. Across the hall for the sampling room. “We need urine.” Find the toilet, get blocked by cleaning lady. “This is for men. The other door is for women.” Door has a sign that says ‘Way Out.’
Go back to the room across the hall. Get blood samples done.

Back to the 3rd floor for the ultrasounds. Follow the purple arrow, end up in Out Patient Clinic again. Sent to the other side of the building. Told to wait in the waiting room. After 20 minutes, ask a nurse what’s happening. “We don’t do ultrasounds on Saturday. Go to the 8th floor.” Back to the elevators. “These elevators only go to the 7th floor. Go down to 1st, then back up to 8th.” Switch elevators on the 1st floor. Up to the 8th floor, surgery and maternity ward. “Are you fasting?” “No.” “You need to fast for 6 hours or we don’t do an abdominal ultrasound. Go to the 3rd floor, they’ll do it.” No one at the 3rd floor anymore. Go down to the 1st floor, follow black arrow to Exit, end up in Mosque. Turn around, follow arrow to Surgery, find yourself in the main hallway.

Walk out. Get prescription filled at a nearby pharmacy. Go home. Spend the rest of the day in bed dreaming of Kafka.

Tiresome conversations with taxi drivers, part 823

Taxi driver: So why do Dutch people hate Germans? Is it because they have a female president?
Me: Wait... what?!?
Taxi driver: Yeah well you know. Because she's a woman! She's supposed to get married and have children! And how can she lead the country when she has to take care of the children!?!
Me: What about women who don't want to have children?
Taxi driver: All women want to have children.
Me: Not all women do. So what can women do if they don't want children?
Taxi driver: That doesn't exist. All men want to make money, and all women want to have children. In the end, all women want nice things, and soft things, and babies. Deep down inside all women want children.
Me: (staring out the window)
Taxi driver: It doesn't mean they are not strong, on the contrary. If I carry my baby boy, I get tired after ten minutes. But women have special muscles in their underarms so they are strong enough to carry children for hours.
Me: I think that is not true.
Taxi driver: Maybe people from outside don't know this. But all Egyptians know this is true.

Welcome to Egypt, where women have special baby-carrying underarm muscles.

On 'human shields' and inhumanity in Gaza

It's the third time in six years that Israel launches a war on Gaza. Can you imagine that? If you were a Palestinian child born in Gaza 6 years ago, you would now have lived through three wars (provided you survived all of them). It's also the third time in six years that the Israelis pull out their tried-and-trusted-'Hamas-hides-behind-the-people-and-uses-them-as-human-shields-therefor we are allowed to bomb anyone and anything,'-rhetoric,  and I'm getting really, really tired of it. I previously posted the below text on facebook, but decided to share it here, too.

So let's talk about those so-called 'human shields', shall we?

[First, to get this out of the way: if you lock up people on a small strip of land, it's kind of naive to expect them to separate into different zones - one for fighters and one for civilians. Obviously they are sharing the same, small, physical space, so stop pretending you can hit one without hitting the other or even that it's their own fault if one gets hit while you were supposedly aiming for the other. Thanks.]

Second, and much more importantly: there is no such thing as a Palestinian human shield. Why not? Because the very rhetoric about human shields dehumanizes ALL Palestinians, whether they are fighting with Hamas or not. Here's how that works:

1) Saying Hamas uses 'human shields' (rather than, for example, 'civilian shields') implies that once you are Hamas, you are no longer human. Therefore, any Palestinian who picks up arms to fight the occupation is no longer seen as human.

2) If, as a Palestinian, you resist the occupation in other, possibly non-violent ways (and it seems that 'being physically present in Gaza' already counts as such), the very rhetoric of being used as a human shield strips you of the very thing that makes you human: agency. It means your presence is not the result of your own convictions, no, you are merely a puppet in the hands of the terrorists. And puppets, as we all know, are not human.

Simple, right? Two birds, one stone; they're either violent terrorists or passive weaklings used by terrorists. Neither is human, neither deserve that we care about their life.

Oh, and let's not forget that the first ones are usually men and the second usually women, meaning that as an added bonus this rhetoric reduces the resistance of Palestinian women in its many shapes and forms to zero. Ugh.

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Running Orders

[for Gaza, once again]

They call us now.
Before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think "Do I know any Davids in Gaza?"
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

by Lena K Tuffaha

Time for a chat

Dear Cairo,

We need to talk.

It’s been more than seven months since we first met and I fell head over heels for you, and quite frankly, I don’t know what happened to those seven months – that’s how quickly they passed. Sure, I’ve been meeting people and discovering places and getting involved in things left and right, but seven months? I could almost have produced a baby, is what I’m saying, and yet it feels like I barely blinked twice since my first arrival here.

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Apartment complexes in Maadi. Just a few of them.

It’s one of the most baffling things about you, Cairo, the way you play with time. Not just with weeks and months and seasons, also with the general rhythm of life. There’s the possibility of going grocery shopping at 3am, rush hour starts at 10.15am, breakfast in the office is at 2pm, neighborhood kids are playing football in the street at midnight and then just when I thought everything was simply pushed back by a few hours there’s the vegetable seller praising his wares on his donkey cart at 7am and an 11pm invitation for a bike ride – at 5.30am the next morning. I guess things are a matter of possibility rather than routine; when there are this many people using a limited amount of space, a little flexibility in timing is useful so if at all possible, you pick a time when you expect the least amount of people to be doing the same thing you do. Now to figure out when are those times, that’s going to take me the next part of the year…

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Pedestrian in Attaba, Downtown Cairo.

But time is not the only warped thing about you. Social connections are too. When I ask your inhabitants what they like most about you, most of them say “I never feel alone here.” And they are not referring to the lack of personal space and everybody putting their nose in everyone else’s business – no, they mean that you can go to any place, at any time, and find someone you know. For good or for bad, it seems impossible to be anonymous in this city of almost 20 million people, and I understand why they like that. Because should it happen that you find yourself at a party with *only* 2 people you know, you can strike up a conversation with a random friendly-looking stranger and by the end of the night be invited to a party of his friend a week later. And the best part is that these are not empty invitations extended out of a sense of obligation, but rather out of a genuine belief that life is best lived together with others. 

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"Egypt, factory of men."

And that, dear Cairo, makes you my current favorite city to live in, despite all the shit that is heaped up on us from above (often excused and justified from below). It makes that I am persevering in my efforts to explore you, to understand you, to grasp you from all sides. Because you’re no easy city, what with the political situation and the power cuts and the insane heat and the dust and the harassment, but I think you’re worth it. If only because of the little boy I met at a demonstration: dirty face, 5 stitches on the side of his head, torn clothes, trying to sell me chewing gum. When I bent down and told him I had no money, he looked at me with big, sad eyes. “But then how are you going to eat?” he asked. When I said I had money, but hadn’t brought it with me, he gave me another serious look, pulled a note of 5 Egyptian pounds out of his pocket and offered it to me to buy lunch.

His situation reflects so much of what’s wrong with you, Cairo, and yet he’s your charm, and he redeems you.