Small Victories

Life in Cairo is replete with small victories. In a city defined by pollution, traffic jams, bureaucracy, haggling, heckling, and Arabs not afraid to cut in line, it’s the occasional minor triumph that sustains my morale from day to day. There are many experiences that qualify as small victories, but crossing streets without changing pace or direction is one of the most rewarding of these achievements. My usual method for crossing a busy street (the only kind in Cairo) is to walk along the curb parallel to traffic at a moderate pace waiting for a break in the deluge of oncoming vehicles. When I spy an opening, I make a hard turn into the street. This allows me to preserve my momentum, one of the keys to establishing dominance in the showdown to come. There are on average three to five lanes of automobiles approaching (sometimes as many as eight), and the drivers can smell fear. Hesitation is defeat. I know this. I walk at a seventy degree angle from the curb, allowing me to cut in front of oncoming traffic. Cars, vans, and buses careen deftly around me. I’m halfway across the street, and life is good. But then it happens. Some guy sees a gap in traffic right in front of me. He zooms eagerly for it. We’re on a collision course. In the unwritten rules of the road that govern this place, I have the right of way. I think. I hope. In any case, I’m in front of him. If I hold my line without fear, he should stop. That’s how it works for the other Egyptian pedestrians at least. And in my two month career of street crossing, I haven’t ever been hit. But, without fail, the thought comes: “What if he doesn’t stop?” I flinch involuntarily and shorten my step by half a foot. Game over. Car after car plows in front of me without pause and, momentum squandered, I’m stuck waiting in the middle of the street for another opening. This is a frequent occurrence. I usually have to change speed and direction several times to get across a large road. But that’s not always the case. There’s the rare occasion when I step boldly into a packed street and some invisible aura of power and protection envelopes me. Deftly slicing my way through the shimmering torrent of steel with effortless speed and grace, I reach the opposite shore without incident. Jeff Gordon’s got nothing on me.

Another of Cairo’s challenges is getting water. The fundamental building block of life is not free in restaurants. Nor does it issue forth from public fountains. Drinking it out of the tap, even in the dorms, is not the wisest of ideas (after a few weeks I was brave enough to try, but I stopped a week or so later after beginning to feel a little yurpy). Thus, bottled water is the rule here. This precious commodity is available both in 20 oz bottles and in large 1.5 liter bottles. The larger bottles are much more cost efficient, and therefore highly preferable. The issue is transporting large numbers of bottles from the grocery store to the dorm. Granted, the store is easily within walking distance, but making the run every two days gets to be annoying. The solution that a brave few have adopted is to buy a case of 12 bottles at once and lug the beast back to the dorm. This lasts for a while, but those who attempt the feat are apt to sweat out as much liquid as they obtain. That’s why I was overjoyed to find a massive six liter jug of water tucked away in the corner of a grocery store a few days ago. After I got over my initial ecstasy, I started to have my doubts about it though. The jug was pretty dirty. I’d never seen the brand. It had no English on it. The label and the top were pink. But it was six liters of water rolled into one, and I decided it was awesome and I had to have it. So I lugged it back to the dorm. It’s too big to fit in the refrigerator and I don’t have any cups, so I just drink room temperature water out of it directly.

Getting laundry done continues to be cause for celebration, as the condition of the facilities has deteriorated recently. I’m nowhere near exhausting my 4.5 kilo supply of BioCleana, of which I now have a picture (see below). But, the washer did tip sharply onto one side about a week ago while my clothes were in it. This concerned me. The machine continued to function, so I let it be. We’ve also had some issues with the dryer. One night it started making a horrible screeching noise that could be heard all across the floor. It was even worse than the Egyptians in the common room. Every time someone turned the dryer on, Dan would get out of bed and turn it off again. This continued for several hours. Finally, someone called maintenance, which resulted in the dryer’s temporary decommissioning. The next day, half of it was gone – the base remained, but the central rotating mechanism had been removed. A few days later, the entire thing disappeared. This leaves the men’s side of the dorm with only two functioning dryers. As a result, I frequently air dry my clothes, hanging them from every available surface in my area of the room. This leaves my laundry with a consistency similar to cardboard. On the plus side, my shirts are stiff enough to be used as lawn ornaments and make my nipples bleed.

The final, and most pervasive, challenge I will share is the constant need to make change. If I go to a supermarket or a restaurant in the US and my bill comes to $12.50 I can pay with a twenty and get $7.50 back, no problem. In Egypt, it’s not that simple. There is a perpetual shortage of small bills, and one and five pound notes in particular are hoarded like precious gems. People hate giving change. Whoever I’m dealing with is going to ask if I have change, and if I don’t, there’s a chance I may not be able to get back all of what I’m owed. This is a constant refrain.

I obtain money by going to a bank and cashing traveler’s checks. Naturally, the bank employees try to give me the largest bills they can, and look exasperated when I ask for smaller ones. If I’m getting 762 pounds, I end up with seven LE 100 bills, one LE 50, a ten, and two ones. The hundreds are highly inconvenient since I’m never going to spend that much at once and there are few places where I can break one without a huge fight. Sometimes the guy at the bank will give me fifties instead, although these are only marginally better. But I’ve noticed something. Whenever I have a female cashier at the grocery store, she never gives me trouble about change, even when I pay with a large bill. The men, meanwhile, always want to fight about it. So a theory began to brew in my mind. I got to test it a few weeks ago at the bank. For the first time, I had a woman cashier. I was getting a lot of money – around 1350 pounds. I filled out the paperwork, gave her my passport and checks, and waited. As expected, she pulled a stack of hundreds out of a drawer and began counting them out. I didn’t want thirteen hundreds and change, so I interrupted her. “Could I get some smaller bills also please, like some fives and tens?” She looked at me, shrugged, said “ok,” and disappeared into the back. She returned with a massive stack of ten pound notes roped together with a rubber band. She then pulled out some twenties and counted out three hundred pounds, which I thought was most generous. To that she added a fifty and change. I expected her to give me fifteen or twenty of the tens and then round the rest out of my due with hundreds. I was perfectly fine with that. This was far better than I’d ever done before. To my surprise, she put the hundreds away. She then handed me the money she’d counted out, along with the enormous stack of ten pound notes, which was as thick as my fist. I stared at it in disbelief. Was this really for me? I picked it up with all the care I would use with a newborn baby and staggered away from the counter. A note under the rubber band said the stack contained one hundred ten pound notes. I counted them. Unbelievable. Somehow, it was real. I was holding the Holy Grail in my hands.

So how did I feel? Take the idea of walking around with a stack of one hundred of any bill (awesome!) and add to it the fact that I now had no worries about change – the bane of my existence – for at least a month. I was ecstatic! With this stack, anything was possible. If I held it out in front of me when crossing streets, traffic was sure to part like the Red Sea. Continuing with the Moses theme, I had no doubt that fresh water would spring from rocks at the slightest touch from my stack. And since I’ve already blasphemed myself halfway to hell anyway, I might as well add that I was confident that, much like the hem of Jesus’ garment, my stack was capable of purifying all that touched it, making my laundry woes a thing of the past. Put simply, I was unstoppable. I could do anything. I can't remember ever being happier. I realized there was just one problem: I couldn’t spend any of my money, because that would imply breaking the stack. That was unthinkable. After a week or so of limbo, I finally gave in when I completely ran out of other money. It’s been an emasculating experience watching my stack dwindle over the weeks. But, for a few days, I was a real life gangsta. Represent.