CAIRO - Low-income Egyptian families find the work of their female members unrewarding. Much of the salary a woman receives from her employer is spent on make-up and new dresses. The family's financial problems increase if the female employee is too busy to feed her family or doesn't know how to. Such employees, lacking in culinary skills, have to seek the help of women such as Heba and Abeer. These two ladies rise early every morning to go to the market near where they live in Giza, in order to buy aubergines, tomatoes, onions, garlic, etc, as well as fruit. They return home, in order to wash and prepare their purchases. They then travel by bus to southern Cairo, in order to sell their foodstuffs to civil servants returning home from work in the early afternoon. Heba (25) and her sister Abeer (27) are regular faces in the overcrowded southern Cairo district of Dar al-Salam. Other women in the same business are to be found outside the mausoleum of late nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul, in the district of that name, famous for his mass demonstrations in 1919, designed to wrest independence from the British colonial regime. Heba and Abeer, and many other women and girls gather in different areas of the capital, teeming with governmental offices. These two young ladies have inherited their profession from their mother, who taught them both the tricks of the trade. The mother died a few months ago and now Abeer and Heba are grooming their own children to help them by negotiating with the customers, taking their orders, and cleaning the place at the beginning and end of every day. “Women office workers do not have the time to prepare vegetables for cooking,” Abeer explains. “So we're really doing them a favour.” Abeer and her sister also prepare cabbage leaves that will be stuffed with rice mixed with tomato sauce, pepper and other spices, to make mahshi, a delicious Egyptian delicacy. “We charge LE2 to prepare one kg of cabbage,” adds Abeer, although this may vary according to the market price of the cabbage. They also charge an extra PT50 for peeling and cutting a kilo of okra (ladies' fingers). Some employees buy their vegetables early in the morning and leave them with Heba and Abeer before going to their office in the morning. They then pick them up, all nicely prepared, on their way home from work. The two sisters do good business in the holy month of Ramadan, because the daylight hours are too short for tired female employees, who've been fasting all day, to go home, prepare vegetables and cook them for their families.
