Garbage City

In addition to the rag-and-bone men mentioned in my last post, and to the official waste collectors that are becoming more common through multinational contracts with the government, there exists (in Cairo, at least) yet another community of waste collectors.

At the start of the twentieth century, Muslim migrants from the desert oases moved to Cairo and found work collecting scrap paper and selling it as fuel. Around forty years later, another wave of migrants came from Upper Egypt and began to collect organic waste as food for their pigs (most of these migrants were Copts, who are not prohibited from eating pork).

These pig farmers wanted no beef for encroaching on the Muslim paper-collectors' established presence, so they made deals with the latter to work on their land. As petrol and gas became more widespread and the demand for scrap paper decreased, the paper-collectors' new role as middle-men between the Copts and the buyers became more reinforced.

واحي / -ية	wāḥiy (pl. -ya)	migrant from the oases
زبال / -ين	zabbāl (pl. -īn)	Coptic waste collector
معلم / -ين	miʕallim (pl. -īn)	middle-man in garbage collection

The Coptic waste-collecting community settled in an area in the east of Cairo officially called Manshiyet Nasr, hidden away from the rest of the city by the Muqattam hills. This area has also become informally known as مدينة الزبالة | madīnit izzibāla | Garbage City and الزرايب | izzarāyib | The Sties, after the pig pens that were set up here. They manage to recycle up to 80% of the waste they collect, although organic waste is no longer used by the community itself since the government ordered the culling of their pigs in 2007. This was officially to prevent the spread of the H1N1 strain of influenza, but as pigs cannot transmit this strain, it's also been suggested that the government had religious motives.

زريبة / زرايب	zarība (pl. zarāyib)	sty, pen
زبالة	zibāla	rubbish (n.), waste, garbage
زي الزفت	zayy izzift	rubbish (adj.), lousy, awful

The cosmopolitan dustmen

The voice of a sheikh calling the faithful to prayer is not the only familiar voice to bellow through an Alexandrian street. In the morning, the loud, sloppy call of the rag-and-bone man alerts local residents to his presence, and anyone with an old fridge, valuable scraps of metal, or even a few planks of wood responds the call from their window and trades the goods in for a few Egyptian pounds.

The call these waste collectors use comes from what was originally an Italian phrase, "roba vecchia", meaning "old stuff", and refers to those household goods that in English we'd refer to as "ready for the charity shop". The influence of the Italian language on Egyptian Arabic was at its strongest just before the Second World War, when its community of speakers numbered around 60,000.

روبابكيا	rubabikya	house-hold junk
بيكيا	bikya	(a shortened form of the above)
بتاع روبابكيا	bitāʕ rubabikya	rag-and-bone man

The windy season

A storm brews over the Med, © the fantastic Oz to Eire Overland blog

At first, it's just the windows I hear as they rattle in their frames, but it's nothing so powerful as to wake me entirely. My heavy eyelids drift back together and I catch the flickers of my last dream just before they disperse for good. Then the rattling becomes stronger, and my eyelids pull apart, this time wide, imagining the panes as they burst into a thousand tiny shards and rain down on me.

My mind has stirred and I hear the wind behind the windows, and between its ebbs and flows there is heavy rain pattering down into an empty street five floors below. Then the wind returns in an almighty bout, a bout that hurtles down the side street and pushes through the slats in the shutters like a chord through the reeds of an organ, and with a crash forces open the balcony doors, and the rain and the cold come billowing in and the net curtains are left grasping to their railing.

This morning's storm confirmed the arrival of the windy season, which will last throughout winter and until the end of spring. The winds will charge across the Mediterranean coast at regular intervals, each interval (known as a نوة | nawwa) arriving at the same time each year, and each lasting a predictable number of days. Each interval has therefore become known by its own unique name, this first one of the season being the Gale of the Broom.

نوة ...‏‏‏	nawwit ...	The gale of ...
راس السنة	... raas issana	... the New Year
الفيضة الكبيرة	... ilfīḍa_kkabīra	... the Great Flood
الغطاس	... ilġuṭās	... the Epiphany
الكرم	... ikkarm	... the Grapevines
باقي الكرم	... bāʔi_kkarm	... the Rest of the Grapevines
الشمس الصغير	... iššams iṣṣuġayyara	... the Small Sun
السلوم	... issallūm	... Sollum (a town on the Libyan border)
الحسوم	... ilḥusūm	... Husum (see note below)
باقي الحيوم	... bāʔi_lḥusūm	... the Rest of Husum (see note below)
الشمس الكبيرة	... iššams ikkabīra	... the Great Sun
العوة	... ilʕawwa	... (perhaps from عوى | awwā | to howl)
باقي العوة	... baaʔi_lʕawwa	... the Rest of (the above)
المكنسة	... ilmuknisa	... the Broom
باقي المكنسة	... baaʔi_lmuknisa	... the Rest of the Broom
قاسم	... ʔāsim	... Qasim (a male given name)
باقي قاسم	... bāʔi_lʔāsim	... the Rest of Qasim
الفيضة الصغيرة	... ilfīḍa_ṣṣuġayyara	... the Small Flood
باقي الفيضة	... bāʔi_lfīḍa	... the Rest of the Flood
عيد ميلاد	... ʕīd milād	... Christmas

A couple of these windy intervals have clearly Christian names, because their arrivals coincide with important dates in the calendar of the Copts, who must have been the first people to coin these names. The Coptic calendar grew out of the Ancient Egyptian calendar and is made up of 12 months of similar length to Gregorian months, and a thirteenth month of only four or five days.

The seventh month is called Paremhat (which occurs between 10th March and 8th April in the Gregorian calendar), and the first seven days of this month is known as Husum. These seven days are popularly believed to be a bad time for planting. As you might expect, نوة الحسوم | nawwit ilḥusūm arrives at the same time as this special week. The way in which the other windy intervals relate to the relate to the Gregorian calendar can be seen in the graphic below (click the image to view it in full-size).

The Coptic calendar is still used in Egypt (alongside both the Gregorian and Islamic calendars) not only for certain aspects in the realm of weather but also the realms of agriculture and fishing, these three realms being what mattered to the Coptic civilisation and the Ancient Egyptians who preceded them.

Coptic was the main language of Egypt until the Arab conquest in 641AD (that's the Gregorian calendar!) and eventually died out as a spoken language a few centuries later. Certain items of Coptic vocabulary survived in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, much like certain manifestations of the calendar have survived into modern times. Egyptian Colloquial Arabic is of course unique among the Arabic dialects for its inheritance of Coptic (and by extension, Ancient Egyptian) words.

The coffee menu

Spot the difference. Read on for the answer ...

The word قهوة | ʔahwa has another use alongside meaning a coffeehouse, and that is the strong, grainy coffee that in English we call Turkish coffee. It is prepared by boiling بن مطحون | bunnə maṭḥūn | finely-ground coffee grains in a تنكة | tanaka or kanaka | small metal pot with a wooden handle, and decanted into a glass or cup at the table.

The coffee comes with three levels of sweetness, as I've experienced it:

سادة	sāda	sweet
مضبوط	maẓbūṭ	sweeter
زيادة	ziyāda	even sweeter

The national sweet-tooth has meant that سادة | sāda, which should be unsweetened, seems always to have a little bit of sugar chucked in out of sympathy, as you wouldn't drink plain coffee unless you were mourning. A useful rhyme I've learnt to counter this annoying phenomenon is:

السادة للسادة

issāda li-ssāda

Unsweetened coffee for gentlemen

which is used jokingly like the phrase "no sugar, I'm sweet enough" is used by English-speakers who don't like their tea tasting like cat piss. Despite the fuss, relatively little of a Turkish coffee is drinkable, because once it's settled it hides between a frothy, grainy surface and the thick, muddy dregs, either of which, if sipped, will result in something like GloZell's Cinnamon Challenge.

وش	wišš	frothy head of a coffee
تنوة	tanwa	sludgy dregs of a coffee
قرأ الفنجان	ʔara_lfingān	to read (the future in the dregs of) a cup

I noticed an old man in a coffeehouse chewing spoonfuls of dregs having finished a glass of tea, and asked an Egyptian friend why. I was met with a look of confusion, not at the man's actions but at my question, and only later did I learn that tea dregs are referred to with a different word to coffee dregs. This surprising linguistic richness has managed to both propel and stall my discovery of Egyptian culture.

تفل	tifl	dregs of tea
شاى فتلة	šāy fatla	(lit. string tea) tea made with a teabag
شاى كسرى	šāy kušari	tea made with tea-dust or tea-leaves
بالنعناع	... bi-lnaʕnāʕ	... with mint

The variety of tea made with tea-dust is thus named because the bits of tea resemble the mess of a bowl of كشرى | kušari, a carb overload of noodles, rice, macaroni, black lentils and chickpeas with a dollop of tangy tomato sauce and fried onions. (The dish probably has its origins in a similar Indian dish called "khichri", which British colonialists then spread to various parts of the world. It managed to evolve into kedgeree back in Britain, so I guess only the Egyptians can be blamed for its disastrous manifestation here.)

Life in the coffeehouses

Rarely does a day go by during which I fail to spend an hour or so at some point in one of Alexandria's many coffeehouses. Many of the older coffeehouses have remained unchanged since they opened in the first half of the twentieth century (for better or for worse) and now host a unique brand of faded, grubby nostalgia. Customers wind up by default, if not once a day then several times a day, and what emerges within the cracking wood-panelled walls are theatres of Egyptian social life.

قهوة / قهاوي	ʔahwa (pl. ʔahāwi)	coffeehouse (also coffee - see this post)
بتاع قهاوي	bitāʕ ʔahāwi	idler (lit. belonging to coffeehouses)

A favourite of mine and my friends' is New Crystal, where we're greeted by the old-timers, some of whose parents would have lived under colonial rule, with shouts of "the British are coming!".

Mohammed has been writing a novel for the past couple of years, and has just left his day job at a courier company in Cairo, and now calls this place his office. He keeps his eyes on the window seats that look out onto the Eastern Harbour in case they free up.

With him is Dr. Mahmoud, a free-spirited character with some eighteen languages under his belt, and somewhere in the rucksack of treasured possessions he always keeps by him is the newspaper article attesting his talent.

Sharing the spindly table is Mr. Yousef, a retired lawyer who leads prayers at the next café along and occassionally gibes Dr. Mahmoud for drinking wine and shunning religion, although another favourite pass-time of his is to test us on English synonyms. We humour him until the rules of the game become too obscure and we declare defeat, conceding to his delight that he is the true Englishman.

The man in the corner is rumoured to have stood for president in 2005 when, under international pressure, Mubarak hosted a multiple-candidate election for presidency rather than a simple yes-no referendum on whether his rule should continue, as had been the case for his second, third and forth terms. The result was, not surprisingly, rigged 88.6% in Mubarak's favour, and our audacious friend probably came and took political refuge here in New Crystal.

Call to prayer

Drifting over the rooftops five times every day is the call to prayer. The first is at dawn, the second at noon, the third in the afternoon, the fourth just before dusk and the fifth is later in the evening. The precise times of each prayer therefore depend on the time of year and where in the world you are.

The مؤذن | muʔazzin | person who calls the prayer from each mosque has a different style; some are warming and melodious, others are downright toneless. Entwined together, these different voices rise up and create a concoction of sound that is intended to bring to mind to every believer and non-believer the essence of the Islamic faith.

The recordings below are taken from Al-Minaa Al-Sharqiyya Mosque, a street away from the hotel where I first stayed in Alex, and the particular style of this muezzin will no doubt serve as a memory hook to my first few days here. The mysterious eruption of sound becomes less dizzying as days go by, as I gradually ascertain the indvidual words.

I mentioned in this article that Egypt is a diglossial country, operating in both Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (the interest of this blog) and Modern Standard Arabic. That claim is only two-thirds true. For the majority of the Egyptian population who are practicing Muslims, life is triglossial, for another variant known as Classical Arabic exists, and this is the language in which the Qur'an was written and prayers are recited.

The first call is known as أذان | ʔadān, which announces that it is time for prayer. Muslims then have a few minutes to change into suitable clothes and perform ablutions before a much quicker speedier, known as إقامة | ʔiqāma, is delivered, and that is when prayers actually begin. The text of the two components is very similar:

الله اكبر الله اكبر x 2 أشهد ألا إله إلا الله x 2 أشهد أن محمدا رسول الله x 2 حي على الصلاة x 2 حي على الفلاح x 2 الله اكبر الله اكبر x 1 لا إله إلا الله x 1

2 x aḷḷāhu ʔakbaru_ḷḷāhu ʔakbar 2 x ʔašhadu ʔalla ʔilāha ʔilla_ḷḷāh 2 x ʔašhadu ʔanna muḥammada_rrasūlu_ḷḷāh 2 x ḥayya ʕala_ṣṣalāh 2 x ḥayya ʕala_lfalāḥ 1 x aḷḷāhu ʔakbaru_ḷḷāhu ʔakbar 1 x lā ʔilāha ʔilla_ḷḷāh

2 x God is great, God is great 2 x I bear witness that there is no god but God 2 x I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God 2 x Come to prayer! 2 x Come to success! 1 x God is great, God is great 1 x There is no god by God

الله اكبر الله اكبر x 1 أشهد ألا إله إلا الله x 1 أشهد أن محمدا رسول الله x 1 حي على الصلاة حي على الفلاح x 1 قد قامت الصلاة قد قام الصلاة x 1 الله اكبر الله اكبر x 1 لا إله إلا الله x 1

1 x aḷḷāhu ʔakbaru_ḷḷāhu ʔakbar 1 x ʔašhadu ʔalla ʔilāha ʔilla_ḷḷāh 1 x ʔašhadu ʔanna muḥammada_rrasūlu_ḷḷāh 1 x ḥayya ʕala_ṣṣalāti ḥayya ʕala_lfalāḥ 1 x qad qāmati_ṣṣalāti qad qāmati_ṣṣalāh 1 x aḷḷāhu ʔakbaru_ḷḷāhu ʔakbar 1 x lā ʔilāha ʔilla_ḷḷāh

1 x God is great, God is great 1 x I bear witness that there is no god but God 1 x I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God 1 x Come to prayer! 1 x Come to success! 1 x God is great, God is great 1 x There is no god by God

A short, beautifully lyrical complement is always called after the أذان | ʔadān at this particular mosque, and I haven't heard it elsewhere. I still don't know what's being said. Perhaps there is a Muslim or Arabic speaker out there who understands it:

Addressing people

One of the tensest moments I ever had working in retail was serving a customer during the lunch-time rush. It was particularly busy, as that day this residential street in Central London was throwing a street party for the Queen's Jubilee. I could see quite clearly that this fan of Twixes was a woman - there was no doubt about it - but what slipped out of my mouth as she peered into her purse for change was a cheery "good morning, sir!". I was as shocked as she was, and the proverbial cat had such grip on my tongue that I couldn't even apologise.

Of course, it's rare to confuse someone's gender. But, as I have been discovering, Egyptian Arabic is has far more cultural landmines when it comes to addressing people than English does. The title you use depends not just on gender, but on other characteristics that in English would be considered a breach of political correctness, such as age, religion and social class.

My first lesson in this came in thanking my taxi driver with the form of address that I've been using daily at university for the past two years: يا استاذ | yā ustāz, which literally translates as professor (c.f. Spanish "usted", the polite second person pronoun). Of course the man wasn't a professor, but as I understood it, it is a polite term that could be used in other situations too. "انا مش استاذ | ana miš ustāz | I'm not a professor," he replied, in such a way that he clearly thought I was being sarcastic.

I learnt later that although the term extends beyond actually professors, it is still only used for middle class people with a formal education. Despite my belief that the knowledge of a taxi driver is probably quite extensive, especially in the realms of local geography and history, social mobility seems so non-existent in Egypt that the term couldn't even come across as a polite gesture of solidarity. People know their places and I must learn to recognise them too.

The second term that got me into trouble is يا حاجة | ya hagga, which literally means pilgrim but is used to address elderly Muslim women who have probably lived long enough to have undertaken the pilgrimage to Mecca. The woman I was sharing a lift with wore a niqab, so I didn't have much to go by, other than that she was clearly a Muslim woman. When I asked which floor she needed, addressing her with this term, she let out a giggle that suggested she was probably no older than me.

Not wanting to reproduce what's already well documented elsewhere on the internet, I will provide this link for a more complete list of the many, and sometimes surprising, forms of address in Egyptian Arabic.

One term that they don't include is يا برنس | ya brins, a corruption of the English word prince, a playful but polite way of addressing young men. Recently, trying to tell an teenager that I didn't want to buy the friendship bracelet he was offering me, I accidentally addressed him as كابتن | kaptin | captain, which is used for younger children, which clearly got on his pubescent nerves. Sometimes offending people is the best way to ensure you won't forget a word again.

Phone etiquette

I have already noticed hundreds of differences in the way people interact with each other here to the culture I'm used to, and none has been more in-your-face than mobile phone etiquette. A simple request for directions from a police officer or chatting to a stranger on a train platform are the sort of instances so far that have led to an exchange of phone numbers. In fact, if I had an Egyptian pound for every briefly-met Mohammed now in my phone, I could probably pay off my hotel.

There is no doubt that the taking of my number and later phoning it is a gesture of hospitality, manifested for example in unwarranted concern that my train has arrived safely at its destination. But it was quite overwhelming at first. Recently, I woke up a few dark hours before the dawn prayer to my mobile shuffling its way across the bedside table, and six missed calls from a number that I barely recognised. I sat bolt upright and answered the phone.

Me: What's wrong?!
Mohammed: Hello my friend! How are you?
Me: I'm fine. What's wrong?!
Mohammed: I'm just fine, thanks be to God! What's your news?

And it didn't even occur, at least to him, that there might be better times to chat than the dead of night. Even at more reasonable hours, incessant phone calls turn out to be nothing more than a series of pleasantries inquiring about your health, your location, and then those of your family. The conversation is brought to end by asking the collocutor whether they need anything, although none of these questions seems to be taken literally. No-one wants to know what your news actually is; rather, they just require a standard answer confirming that everything is fine, thanks be to God.

انت فين؟	inta fēn	where are you?
ايه الاخبار؟	ēh ilaxbār	how are things?
عايز حاجة؟	ʕāyiz ḥāga	do you need anything?

There seems to be no way out of exchanging your number, by the way, unless you're a very elaborate liar. The use of a fake number will be foiled as soon as it's dialled it in your presence. Likewise, having taken someone's number (for subsequent deletion), you will be expected to give someone a missed call. Nevertheless, the whole process has produced some good vocabulary, especially the term for a missed call, which would make the Arabic purists, the defenders against foreign loanwords, shudder with horror.

مكالمة مست	mukalma mist	missed call
اتّصل	ittasal	to get in touch (بـ with)
كلّم	kallam	to phone (هـ s.o.)
ضرب تيليفون	ḍarab tilifūn	to give (لـ s.o.) a call
رنّ	rann	to ring (لـ s.o.)

Always together

This is a song that I have kept hearing in Port Said. I've heard fleeting snippets of it from passing cars, and from ignored TV sets in the corners of busy coffee-houses, and from the shop units lining Palestine Street, on top of which is built a promenade, where courting couples feed each other ice-cream and gaze at the supertankers heading seawards from the canal.

The song is called دايما مع بعض | dayma maʕa baʕḍ | Always together, and was recently released by Mobinil, one of Egypt's largest mobile networks, who tend to release a new jingle at the end of Ramadan. Capitalising not only on the collective atmosphere at the end of the fasting month, but also the struggle for national unity as the country makes the transition to democracy, the song has been well designed to go viral.

علشان لازم نكون مع بعض عشان شايلانا نفس الارض عشان بكره اللي مستني ومش عايز يفرق حد

ʕalašān lāzim nakūn maʕa baʕḍ ʕašān šāyilānā nifs ilʔarḍ ʕašān bukra illi mustanni wi miš ʕāyiz yifarriʔ ḥad

Because we have to stay together Because we are carried by the same earth Because of tomorrow, which is waiting And tomorrow doesn't want to separate anyone

Interestingly, each verse represents a different geographical community in Egypt. The first verse is the Nubian artist Hassan El Soghayar, then a large crowd represents the Ultras, the football fans whose presence in Tahrir Square helped maintain the revolutionary momentum. The next is a band from Port Said, whom the new friend I met in the port claims to know. This is my translation of their verse:

هيلا هيلا يا مركب وقوم شد القوع وتكالنا على الله يالله ماحدش فينا هيموت مالجوع في معدية واحد ماشي مانعرفوش ومد اديه سحب شبكة وخد سمكة وسلم وراح

hīla hīla ya markib wi ʔūm šidd ilʔulūʕ wi takalna ʕa_llah ya_llah mā-ḥadš fīna haymōt m-iggōʕ fi_mʕaddiyya wāḥid māšī mā-naʕrifūš wi maddə ʔidīh saḥab šabaka wi xud samaka wi sallim wi ṛāḥ

Heave-ho! Up with the sail, lads! Our trust is in God that none of us will starve A stranger walked over the bridge and held out both hands Pulled up a net, took a fish, greeted us and off he went

After this merry band of sailors is the shrill voice of Jihan Maghawry in the style of rural music from the banks of the Nile. After the repeat of the chorus, a hip-hop band from Alexandria by the name of Asfalt have their twenty seconds of glory, followed by Hany El Saaeidy representing Upper Egypt, then Oka wi Ortega with a type of electronic pop heard all over the country, and finally a group of Bedouin singers from the Sinai.