As Egypt's population grows at a rate of a million every nine months, it is often the children who suffer the most. Gamal Essam El-Din investigates the plight of youngsters in Cairo I was in Heliopolis metro recently on my way home when all of sudden two small hands clutched at my neck and delicate lips kissed my checks. When I became conscious of what was going on , I realised, to my great surprise, that this small "jinn" was a 10-year old boy wearing a dirty galabeya and with innocent, weary eyes. This beggar child I was told, was practicing a novel way begging, which many of Cairo's helpless children are following now. On an early occasion, I was deeply affected by the side of a mere eight-year-old shifting between the metro's cars with a dozen cups to sell. The girl with barefoot legs, was imploring the passengers who, due perhaps to the searing heat at this hour of the day, were entirely inattentive to her appeals. Finally frustrated by their attitude she left the car. My eyes followed her as she walked with great difficulty on the hot asphalt, searching for someone to buy her cups. These kids are just two of thousands of the most disadvantaged children in Cairo's streets. What faces these children growing up in what is soon to be one the world's largest cities? Hobs, housing, and basic social services have not begun to keep pace with the wildfire growth of the Egyptian capital, now home to more than 15 million. According to Michel Fouad, under- secretary of the Ministry of housing, Egypt's population rose at the rate of a million every nine months between 1986 and 1990. Half of Cairo's population is under 18, with tremendous future growth assured. If the present is facing a very serious deficiency in health, educational and socials facilities, what lies, in store for the next generation of children, who are now under 10? The malaise is well documented. A recent survey by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) under scores the fact. Rating services provided to children in major cities on a 100-point scale, London scored 70, Cairo 46 and Alexandria 42. The overwhelming majority of Cairo's middle and lower class children suffer from a very inadequate educational services. Abdel-Geleel Ali a teacher in an elementary school in Ayoun El-Seera in southern Cairo, gives a true picture of some of the grotesque facts. "Last school year the number of children in each class reached 100. How can a teacher deliver an adequate lesson in such circumstances? One day last year, our students and teachers were shocked to discover huge quantities of sewage water flooding the downstairs' classrooms. The more than-50- year-old system overflows regularly and fills the streets with sewage throughout the year," the teacher explained. According to Ahmed Sherif, an 11-year-old in class 5 in Abdel-Geleel's school: "there are more children than there are chairs and desks, so some students stand up and others sit down. We take it in turns to sit down on chairs. Last year, headmaster permitted us to bring beach chairs with us to sit on during the lessons." Hesham Kotb, a preparatory school English teacher says more about the inadequacy of the educational system Cairo's government schools: "Student performance in my school is dreadfully inadequate. We have here unmanageable workloads, and children who finish as illiterate as when they joined the preparatory school. Though they get very disappointed scores, we let them pass to the secondary school with hardly anything learned." The National Centre of Educational Research in a joint study with the World Bank found that 20 per cent of children dropped out from elementary schools in Cairo 1979/80. The problems children face are most acute in Cairo's poorest districts. In El-Diwika district, east of Cairo, whose residents live around the Qaitbey tombs, children lead a primitive life. Ahmed Fathi Helmi, a 12-year-old, lives in a one room shack with four brothers and six sisters. None of them has ever attended school. Ahmed ears LE3 for working 11 hours a day at the nearby quarry. His father, who earns around LE250 a month as El-Diwika only electrician, forewent Ahmed's education so that he could supplement his meagre income. Ahmed says, "I wanted to study and become something important and beneficial." Looking at his dirty hands, he adds painfully, "But now I have to passed the school age and will probably break stones all my life." It is a rare thing that tourists leave Egypt's capital with photographs of wooden carts piled high with refuse, scruffy children playing in the trash, or a father with back bent, exhausted from running up the service stairs of high-rise buildings, driving three pathetic looking donkeys. But the Zaballeen villages around the Moqattam hills, children spend their day sitting on top of rubbish piles sorting garbage into organic materials, plastics, cloth, metal, and glass. How much is a child's work with worth here? For Fathi, one of the children who collects garbage, it is worth just LE2, since most of the money earned here goes into pockets of a "mafia of middle-men" who control Cairo's garbage collection system. Cairo's six Zaballeen villages. Moqattam, Abu Saoud, Baragil, Ezbet Al-Nakhl, Al-Matamiddeya and Torah, are home not only to millions of rates but also to at least 28,000 people, perhaps half of them children. Because they are small, children make the best scavengers, scurrying easily among the piles of garbage. "The tragedy is that children are born and raised, develop and die there, in the garbage dumps" says a sociologist who conducted research in the Zaballeen villages. "This is their sole environment. They have no other option. They live in aluminum or cardboard shacks. The Moqattam village is somewhat advanced relative to the other five villages in Grater Cairo. The one government school was built 11 years ago. But many of the children in Moqattam village have never crossed the borders of their village. They have only heard about the outside world from those adults who collect the garbage from Cairo's buildings. They are looking forward to the day when they can roam the city's streets but for the time being there is no prospect of a way out." Child labour flourishes in Cairo despite a high level of adult unemployment, because children are cheapest labour available. The law prohibits the employment of children under 14, but it is seldom enforced. The implications of child labour in Cairo's streets are frightening and hard to imagine. If a majority of Cairo's children are now working and suffering from various social woes, what will happen when these children grow up to constitute the majority of the capital's adult residents? The future of the city may belong to those who wander homeless in its streets and survive by working in hazardous jobs or by begging and thieving. Ahmed Hassan, a paediatrician and professor in Zagazig University's Faculty of Medicine details the implications of the deteriorating conditions of children on Cairo's streets. "We all know how to talk about and sing for children. But do we do anything tangible and beneficial for their welfare? As there is no adequate and integrated system of child care in Cairo, how can we raise children are strong, imaginative and loving? I'm afraid that today's children will grow wild, distant and angry. The children who go unheeded are the children who will form the future of the city. Their anger will come to surface when they realise hoe their needs have been ignored. They will discover that their leaders have left them enormous debts and didn't bother to make the investments necessary to ensure them the blessing they themselves enjoyed. A society that doesn't take care of its children makes a lie of its principles." Perhaps figures are more telling than words in showing the dangerous consequences of child neglect. Official statistics show that children between six and 16 years old have committed crimes such as murder, rape, drug-trafficking and theft. A report on general security conditions in Cairo for 1990 to the beginning of 1991 says that juvenile crimes exceeded 7,000. The number of juvenile offenders is greatly increasing year by year. In the 1960s the figure was relatively low due to heavy advent of the seventies. Cairo was swept by a wave of juvenile offenders committing, primarily drugs offences and rape. In the eighties, the disease developed dangerously with the appearance of organized gangs. This rise in juvenile crime prompted the introduction in 1974 of Law 31, but because of the spiral rise in the problem this is no longer sufficient to address the problem. In 1990 more than 3000 thefts were committed compared with 1,479 in 1985. Twelve-year-old Wael Ahmed was recently arrested along with other youngsters following a security campaign in Cairo's poor districts. Wael and the other children in the gang specialized in stealing from travelers. "My father and mother separated when I was six, I moved to live with my aunt in Mounira district where I befriended some children of my age who taught me thieving, smoking and drug-trafficking. Last year I was arrested for stealing tape-recorders from cars and put in a child care centre in Giza. The centre was like a prison to me, so I ran away and joined a gang in Giza led by a muallim who gave us training and sent us out into Cairo's districts. Esmat Khalaf, a 14-year-old, is another example. Esmat blames his mother for his present sufferings. After his father's death, she married another man who mistreated him and forced him to run away from home. He joined a gang specializing in robbing video and car shops. "One day," says Esmat: "We hadn't managed to steal anything, and I had an idea. Why not take revenge on my mother's husband and rob him? I stole LE5,000 which I and my colleagues spent in one of El-Haram's night clubs." Esmat has run away from the juvenile centre three times. "I will run away again and again, whenever you put me in. I don't like it. I didn't learn anything while I was there." Alaa Ahmed is a 10-year-old orphan, whose father traveled to Iraq seeking a good job bur died a few years later. His mother, having lost her only source of income, was compelled to marry who mistreated the child, cut short his primary school education and sent him instead to a car mechanic to learn the profession. The boy affected by the new government, fell prey to a gang of pickpockets who robbed new arrivals around Cairo's Ramses station. He was picked up in a recent security campaign. Launched by the Transport police, who found more than 20 pounds stolen from a fellah coming to Cairo for the first time. This case reflects how social problems in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt conspire against the fate of thousands of children. Azza Karim, a professor of sociology at the National Centre for Social Research, attributes the increase in juvenile crime to the hard economic conditions in the capital. She also argues that employees of social care centers should provide a specialized and beneficial training so that the youngsters can be independent and strong when they leave. According to Ahmed Hassan "every 20 seconds of the school day, a child is abused or neglected. Every 25 minutes, a child is arrested for a drug offence. Every minute, three children are born." Ahmed says that though family planning and birth control programmed have managed in the last few years to raise popular awareness of the disastrous consequences of overpopulation, the birth-rate in Cairo is still one of the highest and does not augur well for the prosperity of the coming generations of children. He cites the views of Um Ali, a midwife in El-Qalaa district in southern Cairo." I and my husband have a butcher's shop but I am better known here as a midwife. My parents died while I was a child, and my grandmother raised me. She got up at four each day to go to work. When I started school books and pencils cost only a few pounds, but my grandmother couldn't afford even that, so she took me out of school after a year. Now I can only write my name and tell which bus goes to Ramses and Tahrir square. So I always advised my children to go to school. I have nine living children." "Though the TV campaigns are quite good, they don't really hit the mark. For example, many husbands don't want contraceptives and will divorce their wives if they are deceived. The people still stick to old traditions about children and will not give up overnight. And if religious sheikh recommends having more children then all TV campaigns are rendered useless." Ahmed stresses that birth control and family care centres should be adequately staffed to cover those areas of Cairo with the highest birth rates. Spending on children, he emphasises, should come as a top priority on the government's budget. "The government can feed babies now or pay forever for the consequences of starving a child's brain when it is trying to grow. One pound spent on pre-natal care for pregnant women in well-equipped hospitals can save more than LE5 on medical care during as infant's first year, and more than LE15 in the future." Ahmed quotes Jean Mayar, a world expert on nutrition, as saying that a child's brain grows to two-thirds its final size during the first year of its life. If a baby is denied good, healthy food during this critical period, it will need nutritional and developmental therapies to repair the damage. In the 1960s, Ahmed adds, the government launched wide-scale child care and nutrition campaigns. "Children like me who attended schools in Cairo in the sixties were afforded a meal during the lesson breaks. Now meals have vanished from schools. I don't know why policy makers fail to see the connection between bad infant nutrition, which could be cheaply and easily improved, and developmental problems which are expensive and often difficult to solve." Ahmed says kids' brains can't wait for Dad to find a job for the government to reschedule its huge debts with the Paris Club. While the government's immunisation and anti-dehydration campaigns have had considerable effect, a lot of children in Cairo's poor from the ravages of tuberculosis, polio, measles and whooping cough. How can sick and malnourished children their school lessons? "You can't educate a child unless all the systems function well-brain cells, eyes, ears. It is no surprise that many teachers in Cairo's poor districts report poor health among children to be a learning problem." A further problem is the absence of a national child care policy. As Ahmed says, while rich families in districts like Heliopolis, Maadi, Zamalek and Dokki can pay for good child care, for the vast majority in densely populated areas such as Boulaq, Sayeda Zeinab and Qalaa, finding regular care for their children is "as difficult as landing on the moon." Between 1950 and 1983 the divorce rate doubled, making the need for reliable support services for children even more urgent. If the troubles Cairo's children face are all born of economic pressure on the family's budget, then wealthy children should be unaffected, yet the problems confronting affluent children are also serious. Many rich parents, in Cairo spend little time with their children instead to hours of TV and video. According to Ahmed, the time those children spend in front of a television or playing with simple toys requires no more imagination than it takes to change TV channels or to press toys' buttons. Ahmed says that cigarette smoking and drug use have become increasingly widespread among the children of Cairo's rich, "kids are left alone for long hours and they sense less support from their parents. When a father finds his, child smoking cigarettes he says 'Thank God, it isn't heroin.' But the heroin comes soon, when the rich child smells it for the first time on one of Cairo's so-called 'sporting clubs'." Whereas the poor children in Cairo's Zaballeen village lack the money necessary for basic education, the lure of easy money in Cairo's rich suburbs turns affluent children into drug runners. "Alienated isn't a strong enough word to describe the plight of these children 'I am here alone' They say. 'I don't care about others because others don't care about me." Issue 24 - 8 August 1991
