What would Mohamed Al-Maghut, the late Syrian writer who often wrote about the poor, have said if he visited some of the remote villages in Egypt's southern governorates? Would he have talked about their isolation, decried their forlornness, told elaborate tales about their misfortunes? In Upper Egyptian governorates like Qena, Assiut, Beni Sweif and Fayoum, forms of hardship that are hard to imagine when one lives in Egypt's big cities are common. Even basic needs are in short supply. Water and electricity, schooling and jobs are all hard to come by. BENI FEZ: This village, situated in the governorate of Assiut near the town of Sadfa, has one thing to brag about: Othman Mohamed Othman, the minister of economic development under former president Hosni Mubarak, came from here. This is a piece of information the villagers offer with an ironic smile. The minister in charge of eliminating poverty from Egypt's villages couldn't even bring a trickle of development to his own home village. The villagers say they only saw him once, when he visited to offer condolences to his uncle's family. All the villages in the governorate are poor, and Beni Fez is no exception. It suffers from a shortage of services. Its two schools are in poor shape. The only people who are making money, so we are told, are arms dealers as an ongoing vendetta has boosted the demand for firearms. In the last UNDP Human Development Report, Assiut was found to have 212 of the poorest 1,000 villages in the country, and eight of Assiut's villages made it onto the list of Egypt's poorest villages. BAWIT: Leading the list is the village of Bawit near Dayrut. The conditions are almost mediaeval. There is no transportation to this village nestled at the foot of the mountains except rickety old trucks.“Bawit suffers from all the problems in the world,” said Abdel-Rahman Dakhli, currently unemployed. “We are not just poor — we are the embodiment of poverty.” According to Dakhli, the inhabitants line up for subsidised bread every day, but not everyone gets some. Most of the bread goes to those who are privileged, the people who have connections, or know the baker personally. Mohamed Ahmed, a government employee, says that Bawit has no clean drinking water. “It is full of sediment, tastes odd, and the labs have found it unfit to drink as it is full of rust and discoloured,” he said. The clinic in Bawit is also short of supplies and services, and for a while it even had no resident doctor. “The only medicine the clinic has is vaccinations for children. One hopes these will not disappear as well,” Ahmed remarked. Bawit's inhabitants complain that powerful people have taken illegal possession of land near their village and are dividing it up and selling it. Bawit's 10,000 inhabitants believe they are entitled to this land, which Ahmed claims is being sold for “millions of pounds.” He said the government turned him down when he applied for an electricity connection. “Legally, there should be a distance of no less than 25.5 metres between the high voltage towers and residences. When the inspector came, he found that the distance between our house and the high voltage towers was 25.2 metres. So he wouldn't connect us,” Ahmed said. HUJAYRAT: This village, in the governorate of Qena, is also plagued with poverty and vendettas. But the locals have one success story to tell — that of a prominent security official in the Mubarak regime. However, even he did nothing to stop the tide of violence in the village. Shootouts are common in the streets, according to a primary school teacher. “We are dying slowly, and the government doesn't care,” he said. Hujayrat is a sizeable village of 35,000 inhabitants. But it has no clean water. The teacher was carrying a jerry can to fill with water from the next village, which has a better supply. “Kidney failure afflicts 40 per cent of the population,” the teacher said, adding that the water is unfit for drinking. Another man, unemployed despite his polytechnic degree, said that each family needs at least four jerry cans per day. “The residents of Hujayrat pay more than LE5,000 every day to buy fresh water from the next village,” the graduate said. Standing next to a pile of garbage was a group of students. They were on their way to evening school, but said their classes lasted for only one hour per day. The local vendettas, one said, were affecting education. Two years ago a student was killed in class, along with a teacher. MOUSSA AND KHIDR: These villages are named after two prophets: Moses, or Moussa, of biblical fame, and Khidr, who receives a mention in the Qur'an. Located about 130 miles northwest of Fayyum City, past Lake Qaroun and Wadi Al-Hitan, the villages are home to people who had to leave their original homes when a law reorganising relations between landowners and tenants deprived them of their land. The villagers here also recall a figure of authority who grew up in their region, former agriculture minister Youssef Wali. But they add that he did little to improve conditions in the governorate during his years in power.Moussa has only one school, which accepts girls who have otherwise dropped out of education. Khidr has a primary school that students don't like to attend because the teachers reportedly order them to clean the classrooms and make them tea. The inhabitants said that the school is rarely inspected by Ministry of Education officials, perhaps because the ministry's offices, located 50 km away in the town of Youssef Al-Siddiq, are considered too far away. There is no public transportation to connect the two towns. The houses in Moussa and Khidr are all one storey high. The ceilings are low, just two metres high, giving the interiors a gloomy appearance. Pointing to a woman driving a donkey cart laden with jerry cans, Hag Younes, a local man, bemoaned the lack of clean drinking water in the village. “The drinking water here is a blend of drainage water and Nile water, and it is thoroughly polluted,” he said. A mobile water-purification station the government sent out a while ago is out of order on most days, Younes said. Since most of the inhabitants of the village originate from other villages in other southern governorates, those who die here are sent back to their home villages for burial. “When someone dies, we put them on the back of a truck on a pile of hay and send them home to be buried. We have no cemetery here and no doctor to issue a burial permit,” he added. BAHANMOH: This village is located about 40 km southwest of Beni Sweif, not far from Ahnasia, a city that served as a national capital in ancient times. Two years ago, Bahanmoh was named as Egypt's poorest village. But its inhabitants recall with pride a man who rose from their region to the top echelons of power. Egypt's former mufti, Ali Gomaa, grew up in Beni Sweif and is famed for the charity organisations he sponsored, but none of them did much to help Bahanmoh out. According to official figures, more than 2,400 of Bahanmoh's 2,500 inhabitants live below the poverty line. Seven out of ten people are unemployed, and an average family of seven lives off just 2,000 square metres of farmland. The inhabitants suffer from the usual shortages of water and electricity and are pleading with the government to start investment projects in their area, so they can have paying work.
