Inanities

Here is part 2 of What I did in the summer holiday by Sarah Carr aged 34.

Salvation came in the form of Usta Mahmoud, who was recommended to me by my friend Karima.

My friends and I did an experiment whereby they hid me, the foreigner who doesn’t know shit, out of view while they met Usta Mahmoud, to see if perhaps this would lessen the ripping-off odds. As it turned out Usta Mahmoud charged a fair rate, but I think only because he is a decent human being and Karima had told him to be nice. We agreed on a price.

FUCK UP NUMBER 1

Shortly before this happened a friend’s wife who is an architect came round to see if she could help with the quest for an engineer/builder type. Within five minutes of walking in the kitchen and looking the plan she identified a huge mothafucking problem in the design the company had done for me.

In the design almost the entirety of the wall between the kitchen and the dining room was going to be knocked down to create an open plan living dining shagging thingie.

The problem is that there is an indent in the dining room, i.e. the kitchen back wall doesn’t just merge into the dining room back wall, it goes in a bit.

So, if you knock down the entire wall you will find yourself with nothing between your good self and the outside world but some oxygen and the sound of me cursing your existence. The youth who came to do the measurements failed to notice this. The engineer has never at any point troubled herself to stretch a leg and come to my kitchen so she wouldn’t know.

Usha and I went to the engineer and pointed out this mistake, which had bollocksed up the design. She informed us that in fact it wasn’t their mistake because I am the house owner and I should have pointed this out and the youth doing the measurements “cannot be expected to look behind walls”.

I responded that even the three engineer types had not noticed it, but it is the company’s job to do so. I silently thanked god that this woman and not decided to go into surgery if this was her view of client participation in delicate processes. She remained unconvinced that it was their fuck up, and since the kitchen had already been shipped nothing could be done.

(The people who installed the kitchen – who seemed more capable than the engineer – sort of resolved it half-satisfactorily by shuffling shit about but if I recover from the ordeal any time too I will try to insist that the company provides a better solution).

BEVERAGES

Demolition started and I began my exile in the living room.

I memorised the hotlines of several food delivery places since there are only so many sandwiches a human being can eat and I was concerned scurvy might set in. One restaurant in particular will have noted a steep hike in their profits during this period. I like to think I did my bit for the Egyptian economy, though not my arse.

Ramadan arrived and work shifted to after Eftar and I was forced to stay in every night watching OnTv and staring at Twitter, so no perceptible difference to my life. Faltas, Noov and Sharshar came round with food in a demonstration of solidarity. I made endless cups of teas upon the request of a surly youth.

FUCK UP NUMBER TWO

It was while standing knee deep in the detritus of my former kitchen that Usta Mahmoud noted the second mistake.

In the plan the engineer had deposited a tall cupboard that – amongst other things -houses the oven, directly in front of the electricity meter and switchboard thing (lo7at kahraba).

There was consensus on the fact that if this cupboard housing the oven and its heat went anywhere near the meter my kitchen would explode.

Another phone call to the engineer. Surely the youth who did the measurements noticed a giant fucking electricity meter and noted it on his plans? He did not, and the company suggested that the solution would be to cut a hole in the expensive mothafucking cupboard so that the electricity man could read the meter. They offered no solution to the risk of my house exploding.

In the end I got the meter turned around so that its face is outside in the back stairwell and its body under a coat of plaster, thereby avoiding explosions. All at our expense of course.

FUCK UP NUMBER THREE

The engineer put shelves where the (unmovable) gas heater is. I didn’t even bother to complain, because by this point I was starting to lose the will to live and it had become impossible to talk to the company who, when backed in a corner, proved to be ghastly in a cunting way.

FUCK UP NUMBER FOUR – MINE

When I signed the contract both Noov and I somehow failed to notice the small print stating that customers must pay for the kitchen in full before it will be delivered.

No one does this in Egypt. Pure cowboy behaviour. But alas I didn’t see it and I signed, effectively bending over and saying “insert here”.

FUCK UP NUMBER FIVE – PARTLY MINE

Installation finally began and then promptly stopped, when the installation bloke noticed that the gas pipe has to be moved in order to be attached to the hob thingie and to allow for the hood. Again, the youth and his tape measure had failed to notice this.

(N.B. It also stopped because we decided to do the tiling AFTER installation because we did not trust their bloody measurements. But this turned out to be impossible).

FAITH AND BEVERAGES

With one day left to spare before the Eid holidays installation began – after the gas pipe issue had been set right. It being Ramadan, there was the delicate issue of tea offerings.

I knew that at least one member of the group was called Ahmed, but there was also Beshoy and Girgis. I consulted widely on the protocol and two opinions advised against proffering beverages. In an unorthodox move, Samia who cleans my house, meandered into the kitchen and nonchalantly asked if anyone wasn’t fasting. A sea of hands went up and the caffination began.

FUCK UP NUMBER SIX

They put two cupboards up the wrong way round, so the door opens in your face. It’s exciting avoiding facial injury the first time, but soon grows tedious.

When I requested that this be changed they said it was “difficult” but when they come back to put up a shelf they forgot to bring (FUCK UP NUMBER SEVEN) I will try locking them in my house until they do it.

FUCK UP NUMBER EIGHT – THE BUILDERS’ FAULT

After demolishing a wall and doing their bit of the job the builders buggered off, but left some of their materials downstairs in our building’s garden. Not only did they leave their stuff next to the rubbish bin, they didn’t tell anyone they had done so.

Two weeks later when the kitchen was finished I asked Sameh, our local rubbish recycler/collector if he would like to take away some of the detritus littering our back stairs and the area around the rubbish bin, including junk our family had accumulated over several years.

Summary: The builders weren’t happy, Sameh was.

And so endeth my bourgeoisie tale of suffering.

Warning: Not only is this post about getting a bloody kitchen installed, it’s the first of a two-part series. If – unlike me – you have better things to do than reflecting on home decorating trauma, go back to your porn viewing.

After witnessing a revolution I thought that I had traversed the gamut of human feeling and emotion, but then in May I decided to get a kitchen installed. I discovered that pain and suffering lurk waiting for you everywhere.

PROLOGUE

It took me almost eight years to get a kitchen fitted.

My uncle sold to my mother the flat I live in (housed in a building owned and entirely occupied by my maternal aunts). When she took ownership it was almost empty, and had metres and metres of walls painted yellow.

Furniture was acquired gradually over the course of years, with the exception of sofas, a flock of which migrated to the flat all at once. I still don’t understand why, it’s like my mother unleashed them on me. I also had a television and a washing machine. So you could watch TV in clean clothes on a selection of canapes but that was about it. I lived like this for a couple of years until the combination of the yellow walls and my voice echoing in the barren rooms and the sofas staring at me got too much.

My mother helped fill the place up, mostly it has to be said with clothes horses, but the kitchen remained a challenge.

I acquired a second-hand cooker from my cousin, but it exploded. I bought kitchen gadgets but had nowhere to put them since there were no counters. People came into the flat and ooed and aared at its nice high ceilings and shiny floors and then saw the kitchen. A bit like noticing the fit bloke you are checking out has urine stains on his trousers. Also it’s nice to have a bit of surface to chop an onion on.

Imbued with a renewed sense of optimism following the revolution I decided that if regime is possible, I can do my kitchen. The hunt began for a company.

Kabnoury would have been alright save for the fact that we are no longer living in the 1980s. Amr Helmy meanwhile designs kitchens of such opulence that if I had purchased one from him I would have had to install a bed in there to get my money’s worth. One company whose name I forget had reasonably priced stuff but I tried opening one draw in the showroom and frankly was reminded of demonstrators resisting arrest.

WORKTOPS WORKTOPS WORKTOPS WORKTOPS

One fateful afternoon my mother and aunt Nefissa were out shopping when they came across the company that would eventually supply my kitchen. We went along and the showroom was filled with tasteful, sturdy-looking cupboards. My heart was filled with confidence anew.

The company sent a youth round to take the measurements, and then we were summoned back to the showroom to view the designs the engineer had come up with.

As Nefissa listened to her motivational CDs with her eyes shut and my well-meaning but spacey mother tuned in and out of the discussion I was left with the task of deciding the kitchen’s fate.

I noticed that the engineer pronounced ‘worktop’ as if it has three syllables and placed the emphasis on ‘top’. Mostly everything else was in Arabic save for this strange insistence on saying ‘worktop’ in English. After months of dealing with this individual I can’t now hear this word without experiencing a vague feeling of rage.

A design was eventually settled on and a large wad of cash deposited with them. They told us that their showroom got looted on January 28, and the visa card machine got nicked. They still hadn’t got one eight months later in August, when we deposited another large wad of cash with them. I started to believe there was something a bit cowboy about them.

A BLOW

My family has never got a kitchen done. When we moved into our house in Croydon my dad removed the pre-installed cupboards and put up shelves in order to ensure that our food and kitchenware got an absolutely thorough coating of cooking grease and dust.

I was under the impression that in addition to designing and fitting your kitchen the company will do whatever it necessary in your old kitchen to accommodate the new one. The engineer broke it to me that in fact, they have nothing at all to do with this process. She gave me the names of two engineers who could assist me.

MOSTLY WANKERS

I rang the first one. His name was Mark. He appeared within an hour of the call and, as became standard with virtually all the males that entered my flat during this period, immediately took the kitchen’s measurements. He was a short, quiet sort of man whose aftershave lingered long after he left.

He returned with an associate to advise on the flooring and I requested an estimation of costs. Mark and said associate huddled over a sheet of paper and suddenly the scent of dodgyness was stronger than his eau de perfume. They were even smirking.

Later the same day Noov, Usha and I went to a street filled with bathroom and tiling suppliers, armed with the kitchen plan the company had drawn up. We got talking to one owner who insisted that I work for CNN without providing any basis for this assertion other than the colour of my hair. He then launched into a discursive monologue on the vast differences between foreigners vs Egyptians re. plumbing.

We left that street empty handed. On the way back Usha rang Mark up and asked why he was quoting me LE 500 to hire a van to remove rubble. He had no answer. Mark’s problem was that he was a pissant who couldn’t talk himself out of shit. He was an amateur, and he got rumbled.

I saw three more engineers/builders/designers. The first, Ahmed, followed up with a risible quote and then had the temerity to send a follow-up email when I ignored his joke of a quotation.

The second individual was a young designer type who appeared dressed like the 1970s. He had beads on. They hid shyly in his chest hair.

He opened his laptop and showed me some of his previous work, and I played a secret game in my head of searching for the actual kitchen behind the zebra print and giant suspended unidentifiable objects. He seemed like a decent bloke and was clearly passionate about what he did. He would be my first port of call if ever I needed to recreate a Duran Duran video.

Tomorrow: more of this shit.

As a service to non-Arabic speaking readers, we have translated the speech made today by General Mohsen El-Fangary and his finger.

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.

Since the beginning of the revolution the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) has made clear that is on the side of the people, mostly by locking them up after military trials and killing them in public squares.

It has expressed its support for their demands, and I will do so now again, in the voice I use to TELL OFF MY TEENAGE SON and during PRIVATE RE-ENACTMENTS OF EL NASER SALAH EDDIN.

I will underline the fact that THE PEOPLE CHOSE THE MESS WE ARE CURRENTLY IN USING MY VOICE AND POINTING MY FINGER. Sometimes my eyes will DART TO THE RIGHT MOMENTARILY, FRIGHTENED BY MY LOUD VOICE. This takes away slightly from the gravitas (as does the fact that the sign behind me is not straight) BUT NOT AS MUCH AS THE FACT THAT THE AUTOCUE IS TOO SLOW AND I LOOK LIKE I AM STARING AT YOUR GENITALS.

I will launch into a LIST OF POINTS, but precede this with A BIG SIGH because when I signed up to the army I didn’t bet on having to REPRIMAND A LOAD OF INSUBORDINATE CITIZENS. And it is SUMMER, and making these addresses EATS INTO MY CLUB AND VILLA TIME. As indeed does your FUCKING REVOLUTION I MIGHT ADD.

1. Everyone has the right to FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. Anyone who disagrees with this fact publicly is FREE TO BE SUMMONED AND COME AND DRINK COFFEE AT THE MILITARY PROSECUTION OFFICE.

2. We are STICKING TO THE PLAN. ELECTIONS FIRST. I will not discuss why NO PREPARATIONS HAVE BEEN MADE FOR THESE ALLEGED ELECTIONS nor mention that EVEN THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM THAT WILL BE USED REMAINS UNCLEAR.

3. We continue to support prime minister ESSAM SHARAF even though we are THE ONLY ONES WHO DO SO.

4. Something very vague about the law not in my angry parent voice. It can be ignored.

5. We continue to have dialogue with UNNAMED YOUTH GROUPS.

6. We will draw up a document of UNASSAILABLE PRINCIPLES that will be used to pick members of the committee THAT WILL PUT IN PLACE THE NEW CONSTITUTION in a MISGUIDED ATTEMPT TO SHUT YOU ALL UP.

Now more points and more pointing fingers.

1. Some bastards are intent on peacefully protesting, thereby harming CITIZENS’ INTERESTS and state infrastructure and the WHEEL OF PRODUCTION AND CAUSING EXHAUSTION TO MY FOREFINGER.

2. False news and rumours will lead to destruction of the country and this is a theory we like to test often with our WARNINGS ABOUT FOREIGN ELEMENTS ATTEMPTING TO STEAL EGYPT AND HOLD IT HOSTAGE IN TEL AVIV.

3. Some citizens are SELFISHLY PUTTING THEIR OWN INTERESTS ABOVE THOSE OF THE HOMELAND by choosing to sleep in tents in temperatures in the HIGH 30s under the constant THREAT OF ATTACK BY THUGS because they think REAL CHANGE and JUSTICE are more important than CITIZENS BEING ABLE TO PASS THROUGH TAHRIR SQUARE ON THEIR WAY CARREFOUR. Citizens are encouraged to STAND UP AGAINST THIS, and are advised to proceed to the Interior Ministry for details about payment for their services and collection of weapons.

Goodbye, and if you continue misbehaving YOU CAN FORGET ABOUT GOING TO THE CLUB AT THE WEEKEND.

[Hosny Mubarak’s voice off-camera: “Chapeau”]

No permission sought for the use of any of these images.

I went to Mostafa Mahmoud Square yesterday and practiced anger management while covering a pro-Mubarak rally for Al-Masry Al-Youm English. Below are the results. A (very) slightly different version was published here.

“I’m against the revolution”

There is a tiny part of post-revolution Cairo that will remain forever Mubarak, and that is Mostafa Mahmoud Square.

It was here that Hosny Mubarak supporters gathered on 2 February 2011, one of the bloodiest days of the revolution, when pro-Mubarak mobs on camel and horse back attacked protestors in Tahrir Square.

The square has been their spiritual home ever since, a small but pointed riposte at the masses of anti-regime demonstrators who filled Tahrir Square demanding Mubarak’s removal – and who have continued to gather there sporadically since 11 February to lobby for unfulfilled revolution demands.

Much of the language Mubarak supporters use, and the methods they employ to mobilise, are identical to those used by their pro-revolution anti-Mubarak counterparts. It all has a certain ying and yang quality to it.

Friday’s protest in Mostafa Mahmoud was advertised on Facebook as the “third revolution: the revolution of anger by Mubarak’s children”. (The “second revolution” was held in Tahrir Square earlier this month by the other side) and declared in the tagline that “ the big man (el kebeer) won’t be humiliated and because of that I’m going to the square”.

By 2 p.m. on Friday a stage had been erected in Mostafa Mahmoud and a handful of Mubarak devotees had assembled around it, adorned with A5 size photographs of the big man in various familiar poses strung around their neck; the 1981 official state portrait, resting his chin on his knuckles smiling enigmatically, tieless in 2005, kissing the Ka’aba on pilgrimage. The many moods of Hosny Mubarak.

Huge posters had been strung up behind them. “LEAVE OUR FATHER ALONE, THAT’S ENOUGH, YOU’VE MADE OUR LIVES HELL” one declared in insistent red lettering.

“We Chose Him”, Mohamed Tharwat’s ode to el kebeer rang out over the square. This was followed by audio of Mubarak taking the oath against mournful violins. The crowd occasionally broke out into chants of “the people want the president’s freedom”. A speaker instructed protestors to raise their voices “so the President can hear us in Sharm El-Sheikh”.

Young men strode purposefully around. One of them was Hassan El-Ghandour who introduced himself as a protest organizer and “former soldier in the Republican Guards”.

El-Ghandour says that he “never experienced injustice” under Mubarak – not even when he was forced to travel to Italy to find work because he couldn’t find any in Egypt.

“There wasn’t any work in the country appropriate for my ambitions, but I didn’t blame my own failure on the country or Mubarak”, El-Ghandour – who called Mubarak “el general” – said.

The conversation soon and inevitably turned to the revolution, and El-Ghandour laid out his theory about the causes of, and actors behind the uprising.

It was a geopolitical pot pourri of conspiracy theory spanning centuries.

During the revolution, “Persian-Iranian” and Israeli ammunition was used, El-Ghandour said, tying in with his theory that “Years ago the Jews and Persians agreed on the destruction of the Islamic state”.

“What happened to the Prophet Mohamed and Salah Eddin is happening to President Hosny Mubarak. Hosny Mubarak and [Field Marshall, and head of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] Tantawy were the last people to humiliate the Jews. If you look at Wikileaks you will see that Hosny Mubarak and Tantawy are the last remaining obstacle to America’s division of the Middle East”.

The revolution was carried out by activist groups “the 6 April Youth Movement and Kefaya” who “were trained in Freedom House in America and also Serbia”.

El-Ghandour listed the names of individuals and entities he says have “sold” Egypt including, politician Ayman Nour, Wael Ghonim, Mohamed ElBaradei, activists Israa Abdel Fatah and Asmaa Mahfouz, and the public prosecutor.

Protestor Heba Farouq said that the revolution was “planned”.

“The MB and ElBaradei did the revolution. It was planned. There was an interview with ElBaradei in October 2011 on Al-Jazeera when he said that things will change at the beginning of next year and we wont be silent”.

Speaking on stage, protest organizers variously referred to the revolution as a “scam” or “the revolution of the drug addict”. One speaker questioned why nobody has been held to account for the deaths of police officers during the revolution.

El-Ghandour was one of several protestors who questioned the identity of the almost 1,000 people killed during the revolution. “There were 170 convicted criminals amongst the people who died in during the revolution. What were convicted criminals doing amongst intellectuals?”

Asked why they are not happy with the revolution when it is now held up internationally as a model of peaceful regime change Yasser El-Ghayesh said it is because “the world wants Egypt’s destruction”.

El-Ghawash described Mubarak as “his father, mother and brother” adding “I will eat anyone who comes near him”. He dismissed claims of corruption leveled against the ex-President.

“These people talk about corruption when it is the people themselves who spread corruption. Where did President Mubarak come from? From the people. It is the people who must change.”

Magdy Mahmoud Fouda, coordinator of The Popular Campaign for the Defence and Support of President Mubarak expressed similar sentiments saying, “There was some corruption [during Mubarak’s tenure], but only the corruption expected in any country in the world”.

Fouda added that his group is currently gathering signatures for a petition calling for all criminal charges against Mubarak to be dropped and for him to be honoured, officially. So far 200,000 people have added their names.

There was unanimous agreement that Mubarak is innocent of all the criminal charges leveled against him. A man introduced as a physics professor explained at length that alleged irregularities in gas sale transactions with Israel were in fact “efforts by Mubarak and Hussein Salem [a former intelligence officer recently arrested in Spain] to get the best price for Egypt”.

Farouq said there is “no way” that Mubarak gave the order to kill protestors during the revolution.  “There is no way that a man who fought and risked his life in the 1973 war would give an order for his people to be killed”.

Protestors made reference to Mubarak’s “many achievements” although when pressed seemed unable to list anything other than “not leading Egypt into war” and “infrastructure”.

Dalia Mahmoud mentioned “the biggest army in the Arab world” and the “biggest underground metro in the Arab world”.

“The stupid people who talk about 30 years of injustice weren’t living in Egypt for sure. Those of us who were around at the end of the 70s know what the country was like when he took over, and what Egypt is like today”, Mahmoud said.

Many yearned wistfully for the return of life under Mubarak. A woman on stage started sobbing dramatically while describing how every day she wakes up and wishes that “she was still living in Mubarak’s Egypt”. Farouq complained about the “lack of security and stability Egypt is currently experiencing”.

University lecturer Sherif Imad – who says he participated in protests on 25 January but went home when protestors “started attacking the police” – said that people want security and for the “country to go back to how it was…what have we benefited from the revolution?”

Protestors have two things in common with their pro-revolution counterparts; consternation about who will next rule Egypt and a suspicion of the press, although in these protestors’ case it borders on revulsion. Ghandour explained that “the whole media is controlled by three companies. So they sing the song they want them to sing. Yesterday the people were with Hosny Mubarak. Now the same media figures who used to support Mubarak criticise him”.

As Al-Masry Al-Youm sought shelter from the sun under an advertising hoarding one of a group of protestors doing likewise announced audibly, “the most disgusting people in Egypt are journalists and media figures”.

Protestor Mohamed Saad explained that ElBaradei will not be able to unite Egypt’s various political factions. El-Ghandour is adamant that only a military man “can control the country”.

By 5 p.m. a huge “We Are All Mubarak” poster had been erected on stage but numbers remained low – some 300. Asked why this was, Imad said that many of them were women and girls “and afraid to come” and also pointed out that it was an extremely hot day, “unlike when they did their revolution and they had the advantage of it being winter”.

A speaker reassured the tiny crowd before him. “We are millions. We are the silent majority”.

As someone who appreciates a heavy bass line, I have had a mild obsession with Amr 7a7a ever since I heard this.

I love its repetitiveness, the way it’s so stripped down, the strutting confidence of the rap delivery. It didn’t sound like any sha3by [Egyptian pop] music I had heard before.

So I tracked down Amr 7a7a’s* number and we rang him up, and he invited us to the opening of his studio. But then the revolution happened and musical pursuits got put on hold. We rang him up again last month and he told us that he’d be performing at a wedding in Medinat El-Salam and would we like to come.

Noov, Moftases and I bundled into Sharshar’s car last night and went. Medinat El-Salam feels like it is at the end of the world, especially when you get lost getting there. It has unique feel; very little traffic and wide streets neatly laid out on a grid system (as I understand it, it was constructed in the 1980s to provide affordable housing).

Amr 7a7a had instructed us to wait in “Speko Square” in front of “Koshary 7ekaya” [“Epic Koshary”] where “someone in a white t-shirt” would meet us and take us to the wedding.

Navigating our way through a sudden flurry of Tuk-Tuks Someone In A White T-Shirt wearing some kind of plastic tag on a Real Madrid strap suddenly appeared and knocked forcefully on the window. This was Sadat; a 5 foot 4 force of nature who we would subsequently discover was one of Amr 7a7a’s “Mic Men”.

The wedding was held in a nearby street. A stage had been constructed some 3 metres off the ground. We were all stunned to see that it bore the name DJ Figo; there has been a public war between Figo and 7a7a whose nadir was this, a compilation of gut-twisting obscenities in English and Arabic directed by Figo at 7a7a. Sadat assured me that “all that is over”. Later on during the evening a poster appeared with “stop spreading rumours: Figo and 7a7a are brothers” written on it.

We were ostensibly there as on duty journalists and so Sharshar got his camera out and I produced my video camera and we asked 7a7a and coterie some questions. 7a7a, with his neat, combed back hair and pressed shirt proved to be shy almost to a fault. Sadat was far more loquacious and when asked about whether they had written any songs about the revolution, launched into a rap.

The other mic man, Alaa Fifty Cent (who was dressed like Snoop Dogg) told us that he likes listening to rap music. Stop the press. 7a7a says he has no formal training and that he intends to “develop sha3by music”.

Sadat

Alaa Fifty Cent

(L-R) Sadat, 7a7a, Figo

Sha2awa

After ensuring that we were provided with a fizzy drink each 7a7a, Sadat and Alaa left us to mount the stage and Sha2awa [“naughtiness”] was assigned to protect us. Sha2awa, tall and muscular and also with a plastic tag around his neck, took this task extremely seriously, and was able to drive away pubescent male teenagers with just a glare.

The space in front of the stage slowly filled up with guests as the 5,000 decibels bass reprogrammed our heartbeats.

Suddenly the bride and groom arrived in a speeding car flanked by a cortege of food delivery minivans.

The groom got out of the car. His name was Sob7y Balata [Sob7y Floor tile]. He was dressed in a white shirt and jeans and his face said bar fight. So did his right hand: he was carrying an electrical stun gun. He got out and was immediately surrounded by a large group of friends who threw him in the air repeatedly. The bride danced nearby demurely with a group of female friends. We asked Sob7y’s friends about what the bride was called but nobody knew. She in any case disappeared sharpish after the katb el ketab (Islamic wedding ceremony).

Sob7y Balata

Moftases and I were allowed to go up on the stage and take pictures. There was a big dog up there that spent the entire time staring impassively at the people below. Figo and 7a7a stood motionless next to each other in front of the laptop and mixing desk like air traffic controllers while next to them Sadat mounted the speakers and contorted like a cat trapped in a washing machine, at one point topless. The contrast was striking.

Below a group of children – one of them clutching what looked like a real matwa [blade] – danced and a table was set up in preparation for the katb el ketab. Sob7y Balata also danced. Suddenly he stopped and there was a furious pursuit as he chased a wedding guest with his electrified stick. Sparks flew as the guest proved too slow.

The katb el-ketab was a brief interlude, involving a ma2zoon [man officiating at the wedding] with brilliant blue eyes. A jolly woman accosted me and told me she speaks Arabic, French, German and English and used to work in tourism in Dahab. Then she pointed to a smiling woman next to her and said she is homeless and has ten kids and would I like to do a reportage on her. Then she pointed at herself and said she is looking for a husband and would I like to do a reportage on that. I said I would when I have first found a husband for myself, and legged it.

The real fun started when the dance troupes/gangs arrived. One was called Brazil, and materialised at the end of the street bearing a giant Brazilian flag, and chanting Bara-zil! Bara-zil! It was at this point that both the nudity and synchronised dancing started. I hope that if I work out how to use the video editing software I’ll produce a video worthy of the dancing’s magnificence. Suffice to say that it involved dancing in boxers with the words “loves kills slowly” written on the elastic.

Noov and I were eventually given copies of the plastic tags 7a7a and friends all had round their necks. I discovered that they bore an image of Sob7y Balata, with a phone number. I noticed on the way home that my tag was on a National Democratic Party neck strap. I like to think that some kid nicked it from the NDP HQ on January 28.

I went to a wedding in 2007 and opined here that the spirit of weddings here encapsulates why extreme religious conservatism will never take hold in Egypt – Egyptians like fun too much. Parliamentary elections are approaching, and according to one current of thought the parliament we will be encumbered with in September will be filled with beards. Maybe it will, but I hope that their decisions will be constrained by the spirit in Madinet El-Salam and elsewhere, that certain take no shit autonomy.

* For non-Arabic speakers: the 7 in 7a7a is the Arabic aspirated H.

On the edge of the protest at Maspero there was a man holding court. He was dressed in a plaid shirt and trousers rolled up at the ankle. His shirt was tucked into his underpants. Its grimy elastic was just visible above his trouser waistband. His feet were thrust into fraying flip-flops, his heels had the appearance of rhinoceros skin; thick, dirty, impenetrable.

Poverty has made it impossible to determine his age; he could have been a defeated 45 year-old or a very youthful septuagenarian. He was a good speaker, passionate and engaging, occasionally producing bits of paper worn out from being folded and unfolded to drive home a point.

He is a panel beater, earns LE 40 a day, has children, and lives in a tent city with roughly 1,300 others in Medinat El-Salam, on the outskirts of Cairo. The families were made homeless in January after landlords raised the rent.

Adam Makary of Al-Jazeera English visited the tent city and posted heartbreaking pictures such as this of a bathroom meant to serve 1,300 people.

They say either that they have been promised housing and none has been delivered, or that the committee assessing their housing claims is corrupt and gives flats to those who can afford a bribe. One man alleged that flats had been given to policemen.

Makeshift shelters of plastic and blankets had been erected underneath the Maspiro tower. Women and children sought shelter from the sun inside them. I spoke to a young man, Sameh, broad-shouldered, strong. His pregnant wife had lived with him briefly in the tent city until she miscarried, he says because he could not afford the LE 150 needed to treat her. She is now living with her father after becoming pregnant again. Sameh says that he offered to divorce her, rather than put her through what he is going through. He says that she took him in her arms and cried.

Another man showed me his wage slip. He gets LE 601.50 monthly to support his children and pay for his Hepatitis C treatment.

They say that they have been fobbed off with promises from the Cairo governor and prime minister for five months and had come to Maspero (and blocked off the road) so that “their voices are heard”. They had the usual conflicted relationship with the media; aware that they needed coverage, suspicious of how they would be presented. Almost everyone I spoke to expressed resentment at their having been portrayed as “thugs” by the media.

The protest felt unorganised, desperate. There were very few placards, no chanting. In fact there was a sense that these people have been thrust together by circumstance but feel no sense of belonging or loyalty towards the other – they are, after all, competing over a scarce resource.

A blue and white open-fronted tent was erected by Maspiro in a gated off parking area. Four men sat at a desk inside it as pop music blared out of the loud speakers next to it. An irate police general made them turn it down, and religious songs were put on instead. Protestors were told that they would be admitted in groups of ten to talk to the men, who would take their details and assess their housing claim.

Protestors themselves formed a cordon containing the crowd, assisted half-heartedly by the police, but were gradually pushed further and further back. The protestors became more and more irritable, and matters soon deteriorated. One women stood on a wall and beat other women on the head with a stick. Elsewhere two women fought, one of them armed with a tree branch. And then a brawl broke out, as two men attempted to strike each other with rocks and a woman went after a man with a glass bottle.

The women were that mixture of tough, suspicious and flirtatious. I noticed that there was none of the usual insistence on lack of body contact between men and women. Nobody had time to think about that I suspect.

A man standing watching the fight said, “these people are uneducated and backwards, they have no political awareness. You can’t expect anything else but this”. Someone else got angry when I tried to film the women fighting.  The attitude went from mockery to infantalisation, the stress constantly on an “us” and “them” dichotomy, where us is educated and refined, them, rough and ignorant.

I found the opposite amongst the people I spoke to. There was universal awareness of the corruption of the Mubarak regime. One passerby started a discussion with the protestors, and commented that “Hosny’s days were better”. People objected, and he put forward a nightmare scenario to support his theory that Hosny wasn’t that bad: if we had to choose between Mubarak, Bashar and Gazzafi, who would we choose?

“None of them,” a woman said.

While I was writing down notes in English, a boy asked me why I was writing in English and not Arabic. I told him that I don’t know how to write Arabic properly, to which Sameh responded, “I can’t write English or Arabic, I can just about write my name”.

The point is that Medinat El-Salam’s tent dwellers may be uneducated, and coarse, and swear and fight, but they know that they are being screwed over, and they are quietly taking on a government, alone and with very little public sympathy. There is nothing backwards about that.

The issue of Ministry of Interior (MOI) reform has been on the agenda for say, about 30 years but (like everything else) only became a possibility after January 25 (or to be more precise January 28 when security forces were shown what decades of abuse will make people do).

Yesterday I went to an excellent talk on “restructuring the entrenched security apparatus” given as part of conference about the transitional process in Egypt and democracy and all that. I left more convinced than ever that putting the MOI’s house in order is an absolute priority up there with ensuring that the next elections are democratic and representative and banishing Tamer Hosny from public life.

It’s a gargantuan task, and seminar moderator Bahgat Korany explained in very simply terms why: state security investigations (SSI) were, in a sense the state. An attempt to dismantle SSI is thus an attempt to dismantle a state.

This isn’t over-stating matters: the state of SSI had a king (Mubarak), chieftans (El-Adly and friends) henchmen (junior officers and legions of plain-clothed men) and a population (anyone connected to the regime). Legally speaking it came under the jurisdiction of the MOI but enjoyed almost complete autonomy. A bit like Quebec’s relationship with Canada.

The state of SSI’s main preoccupation was protecting the king’s interests. It was allowed to do this because its officers enjoyed a sort of diplomatic immunity from any sort of legal retribution; the public prosecution office regarded SSI offices and officers as off-limits (with one recent exception when district attorneys last year attempted to inspect an SSI office and were attacked by armed SSI officers).

There are parallels with East Germany here of course, and a German member of the panel Heinz-Werner Aping told us that after the wall came down the reunified Germany had to decide what to do with East Germany’s hundreds of thousands of SSI officers (many of whom were employed informally).

Aping said that a major issue was the absence of a clear distinction between intelligence bodies and ordinary police i.e. intelligence bodies should not have police powers of arrest and interrogation etc. The effects of the blurring of this distinction are disastrous, as Egypt demonstrates and EIPR.org director Hossam Bahgat explained.

Egypt is a classic example of what Hossam described as the “slippery slope”:  the green light is given to SSI to fight one group (in the late 1980s/early 1990s it was terrorists) and these powers then leak into the MOI as a whole, because after all it doesn’t make sense to have one area of the MOI beating and electrocuting confessions out of people kept in incommunicado detention while elsewhere officers are sweating out confessions using the less “effective” methods of legal interrogations and proper police work.

By 2011 suspected terrorists, activists, ordinary criminal suspects and in fact any Egyptian national was at risk of falling into the black hole defined by these exceptional powers. Not only that, it became common practice for suspects’ relatives to be arrested i.e. taken hostage, in order to force suspects at large to turn themselves in.

This was in addition to the “chilling” effect of other ostensibly more benign tactics the SSI used. SSI had desks covering every area of Egyptian public life: civil society, political groups, religious (Christian and Muslim) groups. When people stormed the Nasr City SSI headquarters in February they found files on just about the whole world.

Hossam said that during the nearly 10 years he has been director of EIPR he received periodic phone calls from an SSI officer who would ring him up and introduce himself as “officer so and so”, inform him that he is responsible for monitoring EIPR’s activity and then ask him “what his plans are for the coming year”.

I remember when SSI kidnapped Philip Rizk the paper I worked for getting a “friendly” call from an officer who said that he was covering the foreigner (European languages) desk for his colleague who was on holiday and that he usually manned the foreigner (African) desk.

After kidnapping my friend and sending officers round to the houses of several of the people who were there when he was kidnapped the SSI officer I spoke to on the phone explained “he only wants to get to know me so he can better protect me”.

Hossam says that EIPR has been unable to get NGO registration because he was classified as “non-cooperative” – simply because he refused several invitations to go and “drink coffee” at the SSI headquarters.

The army is currently using the same coffee technique, Hossam pointed out.

Hossam El-Hamalawy, Reem Maged and another journalist Nabil Sharaf Eddin received phone calls last week “inviting” them to drink coffee with military officers after El-Hamalawy listed army abuses on Maged’s TV show. They went and had the friendly chat and nothing happened to them but the encounter was designed to send a message to other journalists. It worked, as Mahmoud Saad demonstrated.

MOI reform is now crucial for two reasons. Firstly, the security situation is a major concern as this survey confirms and, unsurprisingly, the police don’t seem to know how to police without violence and abuse. Also they are still sulking. The army is currently exploiting the fear of crime, together with the general mood of uncertainty, to suggest that peaceful political dissent and labour strikes are contributing to the “chaos” in the country.

Secondly, if the MOI is not reformed, its powers left unchecked and its activities not subject to oversight it will do the same all over again. The state of emergency is still in effect, SSI has undergone a name change and theoretically a change of mandate but this process is marred by a lack of transparency and there has been no genuine attempt to restructure the MOI and rehabilitate its officers: El-Badeel reports five cases of torture, one fatal, within a period of 14 days.

The MOI propped up the old regime, Khaled Said’s murder was one of the sparks that ignited the revolution. The MOI still has the capability to smother it.