Bird flu blamed in Egypt child's death

Shubra el Kheima unfolds where the Nile ripples through marsh grass as it flows north out of Cairo toward the delta. Apartment buildings of brick, dried mud and mortar heave against one another, keeping daylight out of the alleys until the sun is at its highest. The market blows with garbage, flies whirl, donkeys chew grass off carts, and cats slip past coal bins and into the butchers.

Most families, like Ali's, arrived decades ago from villages. They were electricians, laborers, seamstresses. They hauled country life to the city; their sons and daughters raise chickens and race pigeons, and when they don't know the exact address of a friend or cousin they yell names through alleys and are guided by fingers pointing this way and that. Anyone passing a corner can sip water from clay jugs, known as ollas, a communal drinking habit since ancient times.

God moves them; the loudspeakers at the mosque crackle with his name. They are suspicious of police and anything that bears a government stamp or imprint of officialdom. They have rocked one another's babies, buried one another's dead and finished one another's sentences. And now they can't believe that Ali, a boy they knew, is gone, taken by a virus whose name is two capital letters and two numbers.

"The police have seized the chickens from the market," said Hayem Mohammed, a heavyset woman with gold looped earrings and an aluminum cane. "Why should we be scared? We all believe in God and God's will."

"I'm not convinced it was bird flu," said Alaa Abou Donya, a burly man standing in the shade near a mechanic's shop. "Ali's family used to have pigeons, but they cleaned up their house a year ago. They buried Ali in a normal grave. You wouldn't do this if the boy had been infected."

Down another alley, men sip from ollas, their eyes following a stranger. No one sneaks in here; life and space are too compressed. The alleys open to the wide street. The cabbage man lifts his tarp at the market, green spills into the dust; women sell eggplant and red onions, and fish, long dead, bob in the water of melted ice. A thwack and a tug, bits of chicken tumble from Sayed Mohammed Ahmed's chopping block; cats flock to his feet.

"I only sell farm-raised chickens," he said.

"It's the ducks and chickens raised in houses that are infected. But when the police come they take all the meat no matter where it came from. I have to hide when I see them."