SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Daily Struggle for Food

CRISIS IN EGYPT

Rising global food prices have plunged Egyptians into a desparate daily struggle for survival. Many are unable to feed their families, and the hungry have taken to the streets. Is more violent unrest to come?

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Space Imaging Middle East: The Pyramids

National Geographic: Giant Statue of Ancient Egypt Queen Found

Archaeologists have uncovered a pristinely preserved statue of a powerful Egyptian queen at the sprawling mortuary temple of Amenhotep III on Luxor's West Bank.

A joint European-Egyptian team found the 12-foot-tall (3.6-meter-tall) quartzite figure attached to the broken-off leg of a much larger colossus of Amenhotep III, who ruled from about 1390 to 1350 B.C.

Experts say the newfound statue is of Queen Tiye—Amenhotep III's favorite wife and the most influential woman of his 38-year reign—bolstering theories that female royalty were gaining in prominence and influence during the time period. (See photos of the discovery.)

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Picasa: The April 2008 Desert Trip

I've posted some pictures from the desert trip here.

News-Medical.Net : Another bird flu death in Egypt - death toll now 22

Officials in Egypt have reported another death in the country from bird flu.

This latest death brings the country's death toll from the deadly virus to 22 and makes Egypt the worst hit country outside of Asia.

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New York Times - A City Where You Can’t Hear Yourself Scream

CAIRO — Egyptians in this capital city say it is harder and harder to be heard and to have a voice, but they are not talking politics. Well, not only politics.

What they are talking about, or rather yelling about, is noise, the incredible background noise of a city crammed with 18 million people, and millions of drivers who always have one hand on the horn and a rules-free way of thinking.

“Whenever I talk to people, they always say, ‘Why are you screaming?’ ” said Salah Abdul Hamid, 56, a barber whose two-chair shop is on the corner of a busy street on the north side.

Mr. Hamid was, of course, screaming.

It was 4 p.m. in Rhode al Farag, a typical Cairo neighborhood teeming with people and shops and cars and trucks and buses and horse-drawn carts. From his shop, the landscape of sound revealed a chorus of people struggling to make a living, trying to assert themselves in a city, and in a country, where they often feel invisible.

Noise — outrageous, unceasing, pounding noise — is the unnerving backdrop to a tense time in Egypt, as inflation and low wages have people worried about basic survival, prompting strikes and protests. We’re not just talking typical city noise, but what scientists here say is more like living inside a factory.

“It’s not enough to make you crazy, but it is very tiring,” said Essam Muhammad Hussein, as he sat in a cracked plastic chair outside the corner food shop his family has owned for 50 years. He was shouting as he talked about the noise, though he did not seem to realize it.

“What are we going to do?” he asked. “Where is the way out?”

This is not like London or New York, or even Tehran, another car-clogged Middle Eastern capital. It is literally like living day in and day out with a lawn mower running next to your head, according to scientists with the National Research Center. They spent five years studying noise levels across the city and concluded in a report issued this year that the average noise from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is 85 decibels, a bit louder than a freight train 15 feet away, said Mustafa el Sayyid, an engineer who helped carry out the study.

But that 85 decibels, while “clearly unacceptable,” is only the average across the day and across the city. At other locations, it is far worse, he said. In Tahrir Square, or Ramsis Square, or the road leading to the pyramids, the noise often reaches 95 decibels, he said, which is only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer.

“All of greater Cairo is in the range of unacceptable noise levels from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.,” Mr. Sayyid said.

By comparison, normal conversation ranges from 45 to 60 decibels, a chain saw registers 100 decibels and a gunshot 140. Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, every 10 decibels equals a tenfold increase in intensity.

Noise at the levels commonly found in Cairo affects the body. It can cause elevated blood pressure and other stress-related diseases. It can interfere with sleep, which almost always makes people more irritable. “People need a chance to sleep, to have a chance to think, in quiet,” said Dr. Nagat Amer, a physician and researcher with the national center.

But quiet is in short supply, especially in densely packed neighborhoods like Rhode al Farag, where the streets are alive 24 hours a day with people struggling with one another to eke out a living. In the last six weeks, 11 people have been killed in fights in lines to buy some of the cheap subsidized bread many rely on to feed their families.

While noise is never cited as a reason for the spasms of violence, it is a silent enemy that makes the pressures of life that much harder to cope with, people on the streets here said.

“The noise bothers me and I know it bothers people,” said Abdel Khaleq, driver of a battered black and white taxi, as he paused from honking his horn to stop for passengers.

“So why do you do it?” he was asked.

“Well, to tell you I’m here,” he said. “There is no such thing as logic in this country.”

And then he drove off, honking.

In general terms, the noise is a symptom of an increasingly unmanageable city, crowded far beyond its original capacity, officials at the National Research Center said. The main culprit is the two million cars, and drivers who jam the city roads every day.

But Egyptians also like to live loud, preferring community to private space, mourning a death and celebrating a wedding with a good dose of noise. Muezzins’ calls to prayer wail from loudspeakers in the minarets of thousands of mosques in the city. The problem is there are more people now, more cars, more competition for a sale, more jockeying for a spot on the road. And with that much more, there is less consideration for the person behind or next door, social commentators said.

“We like to live our life with people around us — there is no privacy,” said Ahmed El-Kholei, a professor of urban planning at Monufiya University in the Nile Delta north of the city. “This is not a bad thing in itself, but the way it is expressed is wrong. Before, when someone held a funeral, the neighbors would postpone a wedding out of consideration. Today, you see the funeral and the wedding all howling in the microphones at the same time.”

Still, Egyptians do not, as a rule, complain about noise.

“What noise?” asked Madbouly Omran, who has run a small nut stand on Rhode al Farag Street since 1970.

The trucks rumbled by. A pickup truck hit its air horn. Taxis honked.

Moustafa Abdel Aleem, who works in the booth with Mr. Omran, said, “The noise is not something I want, but I can’t do anything about it; it’s forced on me.” So he turned on the radio in search of a song he liked, and of course, turned the volume up.

In a nation where about 40 percent of the population survives on about $2 a day, people understand the struggle to feed a family. In Rhode al Farag, men worked on cars in the street, butchered meat in the street, blasted radios and turned up television sets. Like shellshocked war veterans, residents sat out on the street, sipping tea, oblivious to the cacophony.

Even when it came to the shop run by Mahmoud Faheem, people did not complain. Mr. Faheem rents out concert-sized speakers, and he displayed his speakers on the street, offering the entire block a never ending thump-thump of dance music. “Let him eat bread,” said Atef Ali, 45, the owner of a food shop next door, using an Arabic phrase to explain why he did not complain, even while he detested the music.

And so the people shout, and shrug.

They shout to be heard, and shrug because they say there is nothing they can do but join in, honking, banging, screaming, whatever they need to do to make it through the day — or the intersection. The noise is the cause and the reaction, they say.

“Life is like this,” said Ahmed Muhammad, 23, who makes his living delivering metal tanks of propane to homes. He hangs four tanks off the back of a rusted bicycle, then rides with one hand on the handlebars, the other slamming a wrench into one of the tanks to announce his arrival to the neighborhood. “Making money is like this,” he said. “What am I going to do? This is how it is.”

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I'm Back

I've been to the desert this past week and had more fun than I deserve. More later, need coffee.

Saying Good Bye To The Kids

I'm off to the desert for a week or so.

Brian en Doortje en Kids

Our driver took a picture of us it this afternoon, just for a laugh.

The Hendrie Clan

My Uncle, Tante, Cousins and their families.

Roof Rack / Diesel Tank

I've been to the fabricator today and he installed the roof rack and the 2nd fuel tank for our desert trip later this week. The top two pictures are at his shop (the smoke in the top right is just your average every day air pollution rolling by). The bottom two are of our driver Ali and I trying out the secondary fuel tank. It's a 200 liter monster but I wanted to try it with just 60 liters in case it leaked or something. But it did work and how it works is pretty simple, there's a filler cap on the top of the tank with an air valve in it, you fill the tank up and when you need to pump diesel into the main tank there's a pipe on the side and I just use my air pump to pump air into the tank and that pushes the diesel out and down the hose to the main tank. Pretty slick.

And a couple of shots of the street outside the fabricators shop. Never mind the goats, a lady came out of the building to the left and shooed them into the house after I took the picture.

Egypt's roads are among the world's most dangerous

Go to Google News

CAIRO (AFP) — Eleven members of a single family were killed and another 16 seriously injured on Saturday in a road accident in Egypt, the official MENA news agency reported.

It said the vehicle carrying the victims was driving at "a crazy speed" on the highway linking Cairo and the northern port city of Alexandria when it collided with two oncoming trucks.

The injured, all of whom where gravely hurt, were taken to hospital, MENA added.

On March 16, 23 people -- among them 21 police officers -- died in a head-on collision between a police truck and another lorry on the same highway.

In February, 29 people were killed in a pile-up on a road south of Cairo that was blamed on fog.

Egypt's roads are among the world's most dangerous. Each year about 6,000 people die and 30,000 are injured in road accidents.

Traffic regulations are often badly enforced and vehicles poorly maintained. Many roads allow for high speeds, and accidents caused by reckless overtaking are common.

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Copyright © 2008 AFP. All rights reserved.

Air Filter

The Embassy has provided us with a number of Bionaire air filter/ionisers about a month ago. I picked one up to shift it the other day and the air outlet was filthy, which I found surprising as it's suppose to suck in the dirty air and spit it out clean so I took it apart and it was caked with dust. I had to get a shot of it and above you can see the left half that I cleaned (sort of) and the right side that I didn't. I hate to think of what our lungs will look like after 4 years.

Our House

We've had a few request for pictures of our house but between the internet not working and computer problems it hasn't happened yet. But to start off with we have this picture of the entrance hall that we can post, we'll try and do more soon.

The bench, picture and lamps are things we've (i.e. Doortje) bought here, and if the walls look a bit orangey in the picture there's a reason for that, it is. We didn't ask for this colour nor anything remotely close to it but this is the best they could do. 'That's Egypt' as our landlady is fond of saying.

And the internet is down again, I'll try and post this whenever.

The Forecastfox Bar on Firefox

It was 39 degrees 24 hours ago and then it was 29 2 hours ago and now it's 19. I've put my fleece back on. But I had to post this screen shot, it's been a long time since I've had "Blowing Dust" in my weather forecast.

BBC Drama: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Jill Scott, Anika Noni Rose, Lucian Msamati, David Oyelowo, Colin Salmon and Desmond Dube lead an all-star cast in the late Anthony Minghella's and Richard Curtis' charming adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's, The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

We watched The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency yesterday and and thought it was very well done. Made us a bit 'homesick' for Southern Africa to be honest. Well worth watching if you have the chance.

BBC

The November Desert Trip

This is a short clip from the desert trip I made last November of Peter Gaballa getting us unstuck in the Sahara while someone is having a go at him on the radio. The 'hissing' sound you hear that cancels out most of the other audio is Peter letting air out of his tires, he has a system set up to inflate and deflate his tires on the move from the cab of his truck. Pretty nifty.

You can see a few more pictures from this trip at our Picasa page.

AFP: Make bread not war, Egypt president tells army

CAIRO (AFP) — Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has mobilised the army's ovens to deal with the country's massive bread shortages amid rising social unrest, official media reported on Monday.

Mubarak has told the army and the interior ministry, which control bakeries usually used to make bread for the troops, to increase their production in order to "put an end to the bread crisis," Al-Ahram daily said.

Egypt is in the grip of a serious bread crisis brought on by a combination of the rising cost of wheat on world markets and sky-rocketing inflation.

Four people have been killed in fights that broke out in bread queues in recent weeks, a security official told AFP.

Mubarak said that the phenomenon of bread queues "must disappear."

While most bread in Egypt is subsidised, the price of non-subsidised bread has risen by more than 26 percent over the last year.

"Where's the problem?" the official MENA news agency quoted Mubarak as asking. "If it's the production, then it should be increased. If it's the distribution, then new distribution points should be opened."

Twenty percent of Egypt's population of 78 million lives under the poverty line of two dollars a day, with another 20 percent hovering just above. Around four percent of Egyptians live in extreme poverty, the World Bank said.

At least 70 people were killed when bread riots erupted in 1977 after the government tried to reduce subsidies on the staple, of which Egyptians are the world's biggest consumers.

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Doortje is back from Bangkok

Rita, Maher and I, two colleagues I travelled with to Bangkok.

It's Raining!

This is the 3rd time we've any rain to speak of at the house, we even had thunder. And while it was just two thunderclaps this is only the second time we've had thunder in the last six months. The picture is the view of our garden from the computer room.

We're Back

6 months, 2 weeks and 5 days later we have ADSL again. Bout damn time.

Update: Keep scrolling down as we're back dating some entries from before we got ADSL.

Spring Has Sprung

The mango trees are starting to bloom and today Doortje found and rescued this baby chameleon from first the dogs who thought it would be good fun to play with it, then the gardener who needed the trowel she left so we had a general idea where in the garden it was last, and seeing the chameleon he scooped it up and was about to fling it over the wall when Door stopped him, and of course me who almost stepped on it. Then after all that drama a hawk dove out of the sky and snagged it for lunch, Door couldn't believe it.

Guest House

Doortjes sister is coming to visit next week so we set up the guest house today. We spare no expense, that's a 4 person tent!

Desert Driving Course

Doortje and I did a desert driving course together, it was good fun and we both learned quite a lot. One part of the course was going up this dune and learning to come back down safely, which was the undercurrent of the whole course. So what we did was get a good running start and plow into the dune and see how far we could climb before gravity and inertia over took. In the picture on the left I'm in the Land Cruiser to the right, I think I made it the furthers up the dune but Door said someone climbed high later in the day. But the tricky bit is coming back down, safely of course. And if the dune doesn't look very steep in the left picture have a look at the one on the right, Doortje snapped that one before we started back down.

While we were practising getting down the dunes this bunch of Americans out for a weekend camping trip stopped to say hello. That's Turbo with me and the dogs, a friend of Peter Gaballa (below) who is our instructor and guide on my other (and next) desert trip.

INA

Not something we expected to see in down town Cairo. INA is the Croatian national petrol company.