Amazing that I’ve survived three months here in Cairo without stumbling into a protest. But I was engulfed in one today just a block from my apartment where a group of employees from the Real Estate Tax Office (the very name should strike fear into the hearts of limited government conservatives) were protesting the fact that their wages were lower than the Finance Ministry and that they wanted to be included under the Finance umbrella for payment purposes. (This group has done this before.)
Favorite sign slogan: My salary = one shoe.
As more and more protesters showed up the chanting got louder, the more home-painted signs sprouted from the group and the more black-clad riot police showed up on the scene. I had walked past the enormous riot trucks parked just around the bend from the gargantuan U.S. embassy here many times and always wondered why they were around, packed to the gills with Egyptians wiling the hours away with tea or cards.
Now I knew because those trucks disgorged their armed contents at the street corner where they formed a human barricade to cordon off the protesters The key to the police involvement, I was told, was to keep the protesters from marching. Fine to have their demonstration in a side-street away from the major thoroughfare of Tahrir Square. But let them out into the streets and all hell, traffic and otherwise, might break loose. So the guards clasped hands and surrounded the protesters, shoulder to shoulder.
I was jostling up next to the police line, trying to get a good picture of the ring leader of the masses, an elderly man hoisted on the shoulders of two younger men chanting into a bullhorn. And while I was pressing my luck one of the policemen turned around and changed my day.
I realized I was looking back at myself.
This “officer” could not have been older than me (21). He looked exhausted. While I was traipsing the Middle East in search of adventure and interesting blogging topics, he was sitting in an overcrowded van in a black uniform in Cairo in the summertime, swilling tea. While I was going to college at a hyper-exclusive school for Egyptians to attend (the American University here) he was hemming in protests for workers to get their wages up over $50 a month. While I was trying to get a little memento of “My First Protest,” he wanted me to, please, back off, so he wouldn’t have to show his officers that he could show this khawaga (foreigner) where the limits were.
I felt more than a little guilty about the use of my camera. Then I felt pained.
This is a very Middle Eastern trauma. Those whose salaries equal one shoe being restrained by those whose salaries might reach one shoe and a retread sock. Some are pushing on the government, some are pushing for the government, but all are just pushing with basically the same chant I heard today in mind: “We need our rights. By our soul, by our blood, feeding our kids is more important,” (a lot catchier in Arabic, I promise).
For the protesters, feeding their kids was more important than the specter of lost work or getting clubbed by someone whose urge to make their way in the world was to put the pressure on people who look like them, only older.
The whole event was a mockery. The poor pressing the poor and all not a block from where I saw my first ever Rolls-Royce in action, creeping to a silent stop just behind my left knee as I walked to class one day. The quiet, banal desperation across the street from staggering wealth (and general indifference, though this is a whole different story) will stay with me forever. If Liviu Librescu represents something near the height of humanity, this is the rough equivalent on the other end.
UPDATE: Story with facts and figures from the AP, thanks to Cairo Live.
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