forget about bringing over the GAP and Mango. forget about building the biggest shopping mall. forget about having the latest blackberry or samsung mobile phone. egyptians spend their lives in the most insane and inexplicable traffic all day, everyday. no one has given any thought to developing cairo's infrastructure. the infrastructre built about 40 years ago doesn't meet today's needs. more people have been moving to cairo, bringing more cars and the need for more housing. cairo is meeting the housing need, but has completely neglected to consider one important thing: how to get home. it would have been ingenious to build trains, trams, or subways while planning the new developments on the outskirts of cairo. but with the increased volume of people and cars, and the same old, crumbling infrastructure, egypt is literally at a stand still. it cannot sustain this way of living. quality of life is severely sacrificed here, and that also includes the quality of the environment lived-in, and the air being breathed.
whenever i come to cairo, i always notice these really obvious problems that have seemingly really obvious solutions, but i can never understand why nothing has ever been done to fix them. under the old regime, with billions being handed to the country from the US, you would think that maybe, a tiny bit would be invested back into the country?... maybe? maybe put in a new train system? maybe update the existing, sad metro in cairo, maybe expand it-- maybe improve it so that people would use it? maybe local trains for commuters into central cairo? or trams? it's so simple, even a child could see it.
and maybe that is a habit of the old way of living in egypt- you know it's a problem, but you accept it because you're afraid not to. and maybe now opinions will be considered, and plans to improve egypt will actually be made? maybe. but i fear that it is almost toxic to live here now. inhaling all that pollution and exhaust; enduring all that bumper-to-bumper stress; and then spending every last dime on the west's latest trends... how is this a sustainable egypt?
with all its great resources, egypt needs to find a better way for itself. tourism is one of the major industries here, but i can see why cairo has become such a turn-off for tourists. it is impossible to navigate! egypt thinks that by uncovering new tombs at the pyramids, they will attract more tourists. no. how about you make it so that they don't come here and spend most of their time in a taxi? that's way more fun. compared to morocco, where buses and trains are so easily accessible and so cheap, egypt is a nightmare to explore.
this of course, is a concern for me, because i don't know if i could deal with this for an extended period of time. i get upset when my subway is a few minutes behind schedule in nyc, imagine the strain of having to leave things in the hands of god?? i like a good, reliable routine. i love to stand in a line and wait my turn. i hate how uncivilized pushing and shoving your way to the front of the line is. imagine if i was working a decent job here and was spending almost all my salary to go to cafes and restaurants, or to buy clothes, just to maintain the same quality of life i have back home? imagine if i spent 3 hours of my day in traffic, traveling only about 30 miles total in both directions? i would go out of my freakin mind!
but i'm going to wait until after ramadan to make a better observation. when life goes back to normal, i could get a better sense of what day to day conditions are really like.
inshallah.
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