ROL DEL JUEZ

The Al-Basatin and Dar-elsalam district has been one of Cairo’s southern region districts since 1993, with a population of about 700,000 residents according to the 2006 census. The educational level, in both Al-Basatin and Dar-elsalam, is mostly vocational secondary education or lower, and the literacy rate is 75%.

Figure 3: Map of Al-Basatin and Dar-elsalam District. (Source: WordPress.com,

http://schritte.wordpress.com/ )

Al-Basatin or “the gardens” (previously part of the Maadi district) is named after its original nature: until the late 1960s it was a vast agriculture area of fruit and vegetable gardens on the southern outskirts of Cairo. The majority of Al-Basatin residents used to work in farming, while the rest worked in the quarries in the nearby hilly areas of Moqattam, Ein Elsera, Torah and Helwan. Families have been living and stable in Al-Basatin for decades, and the area is known for its craftsmen and owners of businesses such as marble and other construction materials. In the 1990s, Al-Basatin started to experience a considerable population growth with migration from other areas in Cairo and the rest of Egypt, mainly by those wanting to buy a piece of agriculture land and build a house.

Dar-elsalam (previously part of the old Cairo district) is one of the largest informal concentrations in Cairo established over both agricultural and desert land. The majority of residents of Dar-elsalam are informal workers and artisans who work in the old Islamic Cairo and government employees with a mix of different socioeconomic levels. Dar-elsalam is known for being extremely crowded, with many market areas, narrow roads, limited infrastructure and insufficient services.

The roads are crowded, noisy and dusty, with huge piles of garbage on both sides, with a stinking odour and thousands of flies. One has to pick one's way through the crowds of people and the heavy chaotic traffic of buses, cars, bicycles, motorcycles, donkey carts and horse-drawn carriages. On both sides there are coffee shops, food shops for koshary, fish and meat, and the loud noise of a mix of Quran chanting, TV programmes and Egyptian songs both old and modern. People of different ages find their way through the chaos, but women are the majority, or so it seems. There is no one building pattern in the area. A medium-sized old house of one or two stories is found besides a recently-built tall narrow six-storey building. Some houses are too old, deteriorated and ugly and others too poor to be called a house: they are no more than huts. Along the pavements, shops of different sizes are inserted into the ground floors of houses. The shops are run by men or women or both in some cases. Handcarts selling fruit and vegetables are pushed by country men who come from neighbouring governorates early in the morning and who will leave as soon as they are finished. At street sides and corners, women sit on the ground – sometimes with their children around them – selling vegetables and fruit, cleaning materials, or sweets and snacks for children. Some of those women, especially the fruit and vegetable sellers, have had a long journey, while others are from the neighbourhood.

The front doors in the two neighbourhoods are open for most of the day. Most conversations take place in front of the houses. Men are usually away from the scene during the day and some of them reappear at night in coffee houses, smoking shisha and killing time. Women sit most of the time in front of their houses or at the

street corners selling their merchandise, chatting and sometimes eating together and other times quarrelling. Bayat (2012) describes it as follows:

Informal communities, slums and squatter settlements rely greatly on out- door public space which inhabitants utilize as places of work, sociability, entertainment, and recreation. Simply, poor people’s cramped shelters, as in Cairo’s Dar-el-Salam neighborhood, for instance, are too small and insufficient to accommodate their spatial needs. With no courtyard, no adequate rooms, nor any spacious kitchen if there is any at all, the inhabitants are compelled to stretch and extend their daily existence onto the public out-doors spaces: to the alleyways, streets, open spaces, or roof- tops. It is in such outdoor places where the poor engage in cultural reproduction, in organizing public events—weddings, festivals and funerals. Here, out-door spaces serve as indispensable assets in both the economic livelihood and social/cultural reproduction of a vast number of urban residents (Bayat 2012: 115).

At the time of my research, Al-Basatin and Dar-elsalam was being served by 196 schools: 97 state schools and 99 private. Twenty two of these were secondary schools (16 state and 6 private) (MOE 2009). Enrolling in general secondary education entailed the parents bearing the cost of private lessons (an average of 10,000 Egyptian pounds per student per year) for each of the three years of the secondary education cycle. With this high cost, the majority of the three secondary school students of my research came from families that at least could afford such a financial burden. Students from very poor families, as mentioned by three school social workers, were no more than 10%.