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Struggling to find comfort in today’s Cairo

September 14, 2014
A busy Cairo street

Cairo is home. I was born and raised here and nothing that happens in the defeater of Al Moez* ever truly surprises me, yet I still find every day Cairene incidents overwhelming. Before I joined Cairo’s angry drivers club, I used public transportation and it simply made me hate life: the random bus stops, the crammed buses, the harassment, the driver that always smelled and never had the right change, the woman staring at me and the man drooling in the back – these were all things I could momentarily escape only when I thought of home. When I go home, I’ll be alone, I’ll be in control, I’ll be comfortable – I used to tell myself. I will escape people’s intrusion and vulgarity, and the state`s chaos and negligence. When I go home, I can rest after standing in the heat for hours in a government office trying to get some papers done as I wait for employees to finish their private conversations while grinding my teeth and rolling my eyes, contemplating bribing them and begging them to get their jobs done. When I go home, I won’t have…


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