Last Days in Cairo: 2

Last post I left off with my trip to Khan al-Khalili with Spencer on Tuesday of my last week in Cairo. I will pick up from there in a bit but what I forgot to mention though was my trip to Garbage City. I honestly forget when this happened, but I think it was very shortly before Sara left. On some weekend day near the end of the semester, Jim, Sara, Julia, and I rented a driver to take us through Garbage City, a Coptic district of Nasser City known for its resourcefulness with the incredible volume of trash produced by Cairo. This posed a philosophical dilemma for us. On the one hand we did not want to appear as tourists gawking at the poverty of people we hardly understood, and on the other hand we felt it beneficial to expose ourselves to the myriad ways that other people in this world live and that shielding ourselves from the more unpleasant of these would maintain an ignorance that none of us really wanted. So we ended up driving through the district itself and getting out and touring two famous churches.

I never really found out what all they did with the garbage except that they collected it and that bags filled with it were stacked everywhere. The city was composed of narrow streets and alleys what in my memory look like buildings made of clay. The many apartments and shops that made up one city block seemed to all be carved out of one long building with separately raised roofs corresponding with a street-level door. Our last stop of the day was the recycling center, which we were fortunate enough to tour. Either Sara or Julia got the name of our driver from a group of students who had gone the week before and the center had been closed at the time. The part we toured took old clothes and cloth products and remade them into purses, rugs, bath mats and other such goods and sold them either directly out of the recycling center or in the market in Coptic Cairo. I remember though that someone said that the clothes used to make these products were taken directly as donations and so the mystery remains to me as to what was done with all the garbage collected by the city's people.

I forget the specific names of the two churches we toured but I think the first was called the Rock Church. It was a giant amphitheater carved out of rock that seemed to seat thousands. The altar, of course, was at the focal point of the rows of benches. The church had to be accessed from the outside, where from the street level what appeared to be a standard church building sat by a parking lot at the foot of a rock face. Numerous scenes from the Bible were carved into this rock face and our driver told us that they had been made by an Eastern European who had taken a special liking to the church. Entering the church from the street we descended a low-ceilinged walkway which led us beneath the mountain and to the left side of the amphitheater seats. Legend has it that the mountain the church was carved beneath had once been in the center of Cairo, near the old Opera House. There was some sort of conflict involving the native Christians and the upstart Muslims necessitating that the mountain be moved; perhaps it was that there was not enough room downtown for them both to exist and they were fighting over who got to stay. Whatever the reason, the mountain needed to be moved and the Christians prayed for this to happen. Overnight, the mountain was miraculously relocated to its present spot and had since bee the sight of many pilgrimages until the church was finally cut at its foot.

The other church was located in what had been a cave filled with rock rubble. To make the church the cave was cleared of all the rubble and rows for pews and a platform for the altar were carved into the base. A facade was build up at the two opening. The cave was bowl shaped with a rock roof with entrances on either side that opened to daylight. On the side we entered the entrance was narrow and had a domed-shaped mosaic near the short stairwell leading into the back row of pews. The opposite opening was much larger and covered with a large window which let in plenty of light. Bible scenes and verses were cut into the walls of this church as well.

After these churches we drove through the city until we got to the recycling center, and then on the way back to Zamalek we took a detour through the City of the Dead. This had once been a grave yard filled with above-ground graves and mausoleums lain out in a city grid. An earthquake in the recent past had misplaced many people living in poverty who took up quarters in the mausoleums, turning the graveyard into a living, functioning "City of the Dead."

As for our driver, he was a little forward with the girls in the group. This had of by now become expected of most Egyptian men but he was creepster none-the-less. Aside from the uncomfortableness he created with us at times he had done a decent job of chauffeuring us around.