Dirt With a View

I spent the afternoon sitting in a brown plastic chair next to a white plastic table watching the cars go by beneath the shadow of the mountain that houses Saleh el-Din Citadel and the concrete frame of what will soon be the Egyptian Treasury opposite. It was my day to reward myself with a glass bottle of Coke, and I sipped it slowly while Moussa drank his tea and smoked shisha from the water pipe. Soon he stopped and started throwing rocks at a glass bottle lying on its side a small ways down the hill. I joined in with large chunks of brick. Both of us kept missing until finally he lodged a small stone perfectly and it shattered the glass, leaving shards of dangerous sharpness sticking out of the sand. This is the closest I think I'll get to a terrace café. 

We were sitting on the edge of Manshiyet Nasr. It was a short day for me, but my first day back in the school and seeing the boys. They're doing well, all of them, and all happy to see me. I gave Bola his gift - a small, digital Kodak camera that I got for Christmas about eight years ago. It's been sitting unused on my mom's desk for the last four, and he had asked me for one before I left. It wasn't until I was home during the holidays that I saw it, something I had completely forgotten about, and knew it would be perfect. We're so blessed with wealth that we're up to our ears in digital apparatuses that we no longer use. Even after some time here, I'm still startled by the contrast. 

Moussa showed me his bakery today. It opened on the first of this year, but when I say bakery, I mean nothing akin to warm, fluffy croissants, muffins, and chocolate drizzled doughy confections. Bakeries in Manshiya are as utilitarian as it gets. They buy flour from a monastery in 50 kilogram bags which they mix with water, yeast, and some salt before letting it rise for half an hour. They then roll balls of dough in tiny seeds before setting them on long wooden flats that are shoved through a gargantuan metal oven. This creates the discs of bread that float through the streets atop lattice trays in sandy abundance. The tiny seeds rub off on hands like gritty dust, so the circle is usually folded and rubbed together to dislodge all that's loose. It doesn't keep the tan powder from sprinkling over table tops and all over my black sleeves, but it helps a little. 

Moussa tells me the 50 kilo bags cost 100 pounds apiece. One bag makes 70 flats of bread, sold at roughly 2 pounds each which adds up to 40 pounds profit. With today's exchange rate, that is about $6.35 made on each bag of flour. That doesn't include the cost of machinery or the salary of the baker or any equipment repair costs. I have to wonder if they even sell 70 flats of bread a day. 

But he has big dreams, this Moussa. He hopes to study recycling practices in England or America for a few years to learn and share what he knows before coming back to help improve his community. He's building out his apartment for his fiancée whom he would marry tomorrow if her family would allow her too without insisting she acquire all the furniture and everything needed for their life together before she walk down the aisle. He hopes after my being here for 5 months, he will speak perfect English and I will speak perfect Arabic and maybe the two of us can open an office of translation on the edge of Manshiyet Nasr to serve all the tourists. The safest response to things like this is "God willing." He's a pillar of his community: self-educated, entrepreneurial, ambitious. I have yet to pass a person on the muddy streets who doesn't know him. Anytime I have doubts about meeting someone new, he says, "You are with Moussa. Do not worry." His family has been in Manshiya since the beginning 60 years ago. His father put his hand on the dirt where we sat and claimed it as his own, and so now it is so. I guess the café is just using it on loan. I asked him why his father wanted it, and he said, "Because it is beautiful."