On a bus but going nowhere in Cairo
A ride in one of the crowded rattletraps is a journey through a chaotic city teeming with poverty, despair and disillusionment.
CAIRO — It wasn't the kind of dawn a man relishes, but it came nonetheless, foggy and cold, a light wind blowing past the spoiled glamour of the Cleopatra Palace. Beneath the overpass, Mohammed Atteya, a father of two, sat in his minibus, angry about rising milk and gas prices and troubled by the way a life can turn out.
Students, laborers and a few clerks clambered aboard and paid him a fare of 1.25 pounds (23 cents) each. The door slid shut and Atteya swung left, straightened out and slipped into traffic. He is a man for hire, leasing a richer man's bus, putting up with surly passengers, paying bribes to cops. At the end of each month he doesn't even have enough left over to buy a rose for his wife.
"I smile because if I didn't I'd explode," said Atteya, 31, a slender man, his eyes squinting through the rain on the windshield. "Milk costs 4 pounds; it used to be 2. I used to fuel this bus for 25 pounds; now it costs 45 pounds. I dream of owning my own bus, but that would cost at least 150,000 pounds. That would take a miracle. It shouldn't be like this."
Egypt is a nation of millions of Atteyas trying to survive amid inflation, corruption, battered roads, broken buildings and a government that has yet to ease their burden. President Hosni Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party is considering further cuts to food and energy subsidies to ease public debt.
Salaries are stagnant; doctors, some earning as little as $45 a month, have threatened a nationwide strike; and many Egyptians walk around clenched up and angry, waiting to be provoked.
The dour spirit of the times rides in the crowded minibuses of Cairo. Chinked and rusted, windows cracked, tires bald, seats ripped, minibuses careen through alleys and zigzag over overpasses. They are held together by scavenged screws and borrowed bolts; they rattle and screech and, sometimes, shudder and die on the roadside. Passengers tumble out unexpectedly. The driver may not have a license; insurance is two guys fighting over a dent until one agrees to shell out cash on the spot.
But the minibuses are a cheap, never-ending flood -- a quasi-regulated necessity born of a Cairo whose population jumped from 6.8 million in 1996 to more than 17 million today. Their ranks began growing years ago when farmers and mill boys left the Nile Delta for the metropolis.
