Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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A class of their own

By Mariz Tadros

The desks are drawn to the back of the room, a stove is sitting in one corner, clothes are hanging on a line stretching from one end of the room to the other, chicken are skipping between the desks, pots and pans as they rummage for food, and on a straw mattress under a blackboard, a baby is sound asleep. The adjoining rooms on the floor and on the one above have similar set-ups, except for the odd piece of furniture on the side.

The desks and the blackboard do not mean that the inhabitants of the room are particularly studious. These families are living in the classrooms of Sayed El-Shohada'a, a school near the low-income suburb of Meit Okba, where they used to live just less than two months ago. For more than 45 days, each of the 21 families has been occupying a classroom, sometimes with up to nine people crammed inside.

The families are not on strike, nor did they willingly move to the school. They were content to live in the one-room dwellings they used to occupy in Meit Okba for countless years until the bulldozers came to clear the way for the 26th of July road. Construction work is continuing around the clock at Meit Okba, where many homes have been pulled down, to make way for the second stage of the new highway, part of the Cairo ringroad, connecting the desert road and the 6th of October satellite city with Mohandessin. Other families were evicted and provided with housing in nearby areas -- but not these 21 families.

It all began around midday one day, recounted Fatheya Amin, a widow with five children, when they were drinking tea in their one-room dwelling at 18 Haret Al-Nassag. "My children and I could see some houses shaking around us, and then it was the house next to us. One of my children said to me, 'Let's get out, they will bring this building down'. I said, 'No way. If they intended to pull this place down, they would have come and warned us and told us where we were to go instead'. So I refused to move, but suddenly I could feel the house shake madly. I screamed, picked up my children and ran for our lives. The house collapsed; I think if we had stayed a few minutes longer, we would not have been alive today," she cried.

Fatheya and her children lost all their belongings -- a couple of beds, the odd sofa and a few chairs. She said she went to complain to the authorities several times; they nodded their heads, commiserated and promised to provide her with alternative accommodation as soon as possible.

At the beginning, Fatheya and the other families were moved to Al- Wafaa School. They were promised it would be only for a day or two. "It was scary. There were no windows and no doors and I was so worried someone might force his way in in the middle of the night. There were many young men around the area and, with my four girls, well, you know.... So I used to stay up all night watching over them." With the exception of four households, the families are headed by females, and they had to rely on the men to take nightly shifts to watch over the open rooms.

Ateyyat Ibrahim's brother-in-law offered to take her girls to live with his family temporarily so that she would not worry about them, but now she misses her girls desperately.

Ateyyat, a widow with six children who used to live on 25 Sharia Al-Gam'ie Street, also recounted the horror of feeling the house, in which 10 other families lived, tremble while they were inside. She also fled with hardly any belongings apart from the galabiya she had on. After the bulldozer brought the building down, she said she went to the police station five times asking for help.

Following her arrival at Al-Wafaa School, the Ministry of Social Affairs gave each family LE25 and a few blankets to be used as bedding. "We went to the municipal official in charge, the Ministry of Housing and even to the governor of Giza. The ministry told us if we have LE3,000 they can provide us with homes. At the governorate, they told us if we have LE5,000 they will give us a place on the spot."

But Ateyyat and the other families occupying the classrooms do not have that kind of money. "For the last 35 years, I had paid LE2 in monthly rent for the room which I shared with my late husband and my children; where am I going to get this kind of money?"

A woman who has taken up residence in the classroom next door interrupted: "Look, whatever money they ask for, we will give them; we are prepared to beg on the streets to make sure they get the money they ask for. But instead of asking for a lump sum, why can't we pay in instalments? At least this will give us time to sort out our affairs."

One man barged in and shouted: "We shouldn't be paying anything. The government is supposed to be paying us for throwing us on the street. It should compensate us for our homes and our belongings which are under the rubble now. We did not want anything from anybody; we were just fine until this happened."

On the verge of tears, Magda Sayed said that her husband had died a few years ago, leaving her with three children. Because she receives no pension, she used to make her living by selling sweets and cigarettes in the basement of her house. "Now I have no husband, no home and no income. I used to work particularly hard around this time of year so that I can make a little extra money to get my children through another school year. Now how am I going to get them into school, let alone pay LE5,000?"

Sayed Gohar, the municipal official responsible for Meit Okba and Agouza, was not available for comment.

Enraged, bitter and heartbroken, the 21 families said that they were not going to budge, even when the school year starts on 18 September, until the government provides them with one-room dwellings. As they spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly, Latafat Abdel-Latif, the headmistress of Sayed El-Shohada'a School, came in, furious at the repeated visits paid by reporters to her school. She feels she has been done an injustice by the system. "They told me these families will stay only for a week, and now they have been here for weeks on end," she said. "What am I going to do? I let them in according to the instructions I received from above, but this can't go on. They are using the blackboards as beds and they are using the toilets, so the plumbing will need to be fixed, and there are many repairs needed now. Where are we going to get the money? What is going to happen when the students arrive? We need to have our classrooms back." Latafat has every right to be anxious: what is going to happen when the students arrive?

Time is running out. The school houses only 30 classrooms, certainly not enough to accommodate both students and families. The government has about two weeks to find alternative houses for the evicted families.

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