Streets and Cafes in Cairo

The center of Cairo boils with activity, it is filled with shops, malls, restaurants, take aways and people selling in the street daily useful stuff and completely useless junk. Billion coloured lights flash everywhere around, in the middle of the night the noise of the horns decreases....but it never totally dies (mal bicho nunca muere). I sat in one of the restaurants in this little street to eat the whole menu: brain, liver, salad and tahina:

The Tahrir square is a massive (and means really massive) square en the centre of Cairo where governmental buildings, mosques, the Egyptian museum and KFC can be found. A street view from the metro station exit:

Just around the corner from where this picture was taken, there is this tiny old style cafe with tables on the pavement and on the street...where old men smoke shisha:

If this city is the city of the thousands minarets, then it could as well be the city of the million cafes :) I have just tasted a few of them. This is the view of a shop from a cafe in El kalili souk where i sat all nite:

In the city center we sat in a quite nice cafe, hidden in a back street:

This cafe was very particular as the building next to it looked very suspicious. Loud music banging through its windows, laughs of women, dodgy guy in the door and so many air conditioners...what happens in that place to get so hot???

And finally my lovely local in Helwan with its chilled out atmosphere and its carved chairs:


The filled stones ready to be smoked in the shishas:


The covers of the shishas piled up on a dusty box :

And in the entrance of my local you can find the latest model of washing machine, i have never seen one this size before...and i really dunno what is it doing there:

Helwan orphanage

Ana akum kalilan bfard al kifaya bdar al aitam

Last Friday was the orphan´s day; to "celebrate" it, i volunteered (in a cafe promise to early man) to attend Dar Roshdy Orphanage for girls in Helwan (South Cairo) to take pictures of the party they were throwing and to serve food for few hundred women (the latter didn´t finally happen for some technical problem, but the intention is the important). In there i met the director of the centre, Miss. Nora El Shikh. This woman has a presence and energy that i felt it since the moment i got in the room. Everybody listens to her and the children absolutely love her to bits. I heard the story that one guy that was visiting was massacred by the children because somebody told them, as a joke, that he did not like the director. Water, food, chairs and every imaginable object was thrown to him and then all the girls did a human pile with him on the bottom for punishing him :D this tells a lot about this wonderful woman and about the character of the children :) The orphanage is for girls that have lost their parents, or with parents that cannot take care of them. The door of the place is shown in the picture:

I was a bit uncomfortable at the beginning to take pictures, as i didnt know what kind of reaction i was going to get. But it turned out to be so much fun, children were jumping in front of the camera every time i was taking a picture. They learned my name oh so fast, they were shouting at me to ask me for a picture, bringing me their friends, posing for me, fooling around in front of the camera. They spoiled me with sweets too, everyone of them thanked me for taking their pictures and gave me a cake or a lillypop or anything else, i had to eat them all :D I really loved every moment in there, some of the group pictures:

And in this particular day some boys were there for the party too.


And some of the portraits:


I tried to include as many children as i could in this post, but i am afraid that i still missed some...my apologies to them x x x Do not to forget some of the volunteers:

And finally: the subtitle of the post is a transcription from classic Arabic (Al arabeia al Fusha):

Ana (i) akum (do) kalilan (little/bit) bfard al-kifaya (in social obligation) badar (in tha house) al-aitam (of the orphans) = I do a bit of my social obligations in the orphanage...irrespectively of cultures, we all have social obligations; in the particular case of Islam the concept of fard al-kifaya embodies it. The people and the young volunteers working there are fulfilling that, they are trying to help people that are in worse situation than them...and they are not precisely well off. In this globalisation age these are the kind of concepts that should travel through cultures, these are the kind of actions that should not know about national borders, transnational fard al kifaya. It is my social obligation to use my camera to take the pics, to post them in my blog and to try to help them by asking you to donate money for this place that take care of the of the ones in more need. I will include the web address of the orphanage in this post in the future (the web is being updated), contact me in my email for further information of how to send money. Even a few english pounds would make a big difference for them. Thanks very much. Rabbena Yijalik.