I didn't realize the terrible amount of sidewalk encroachments or the gravity of the suffering of local residents in Maadi, until I was flooded with hundreds of letters, e-mails and telephone calls in response to last week's column titled "Sidewalk for sale in Maadi . In the column, I discussed the conduct of (irresponsible) officials at the Maadi municipal council and about how the "tips for which they sell the sidewalks don't end up in the coffers of Finance Minister Youssef Boutros Ghali. One of the messages was from Ashraf Farghali who complained that pedestrians can no longer find paths to walk on. "And please don't talk about sidewalks, or else they'll tell us to walk on the walls, he wrote. "Regards to the local council staff, but shouldn't Ghali have scrapped their salaries to remove the burden from the State or add their salaries to the electricity bill under the garbage item? Nadia Helmi said that I blew the issue out of proportion when I said that there are no more sidewalks in Maadi after the local council staff have sold them. She told me over the phone that she actually found one sidewalk on a Maadi street when she lost her way visiting a friend. Nadia gave me the exact address of the sidewalk she had found. Strangely, I received an email from Mohsen Mehana and a lawyer called Hani, who referred to the very same sidewalk. He said that no one is pleased with pavements in Egypt. He said that sidewalks are too high off the ground to the extent that ordinary people can't climb a sidewalk without exerting themselves inhumanely, while everywhere else in the world sidewalks are built according to set specifications. The most serious message I received was one that included an alarming list of sidewalk encroachments in Maadi, Degla and New Maadi. The list is made up of more than a 100 blatant cases which no local council can possibly overlook, but officials at the Maadi municipal council claim that they know nothing about them. I would have liked to publish that list in full here to tip off the local council, which denies the transgressions claiming that they have no documents proving the sale of sidewalk and that the concerned employees do not recognize any disappearances, but since I am committed to a limited space I will list as many as I can, so as not to commit here a similar transgression. The complete list is available with me for all those who wish to know the extent of crime being committed in Maadi - a once beautiful residential area built by a Belgian company, according to a letter by Essam Gohar. It dedicated space for a beautiful club for its residents. Membership of the Maadi Club was for free for those living there. The company had also sold lots of land in installments if buyers built their homes in two years in this upscale neighborhood, which filmmakers often used to shoot their movies in the 1950s and 1960s. "Thank God, I told Gohar, "we got rid of the exploiting foreign company and that the fate of our beautiful, upscale quiet neighborhood is now in the hands of the local council staff, not in the hands of the foreign colonialists. If the price that Maadi residents had to pay for their independence from colonialists is to lose their sidewalks, then it is a small price to pay compared to the money raked in by local council staff as the following sidewalk encroachments list proves: 50, Road 15; 56 Road 15; 66 Road 15; 69 Road 15; 1 Midan Port Said; 25 Port Said Stree; 2 Club Street; 44 Road 16; 26 Orabi Street; 49 Road 18; 47 Nahda Street; 73 Road 15; 3 Club Street; 74 Road 15.etc. Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Arab Writers' Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
