CAIRO - Over the years, senior officials have repeatedly promised to improve the lives of the millions of Egyptians who dwell in the nation's shantytowns, but nothing has happened. These shantytowns have been described as a time bomb, ready to go off at any moment. One of them, known as Batn el-Baqara (The Cow's Abdomen), is located in Old Cairo. Its residents are very poor. Many of them don't know what meat tastes like, while a piece of fruit is a luxury reserved for feast days. As for the frail, hungry children, they have to make do with plastic bottles and other things they scavenge from the garbage to use as toys. Um Ahmed, sitting on her doorstep there, regrets that they don't have a sewerage system and that there are pools of sewage in many of the streets. “There are also huge mountains of garbage that no-one collects, spreading disease. Thugs rob us and assault our girls. I wish someone would tell the country's senior officials about our problems,” she complains. Her friend, Um Mohamed, has five children. She dreams of living in a clean healthy environment for the sake of her children. “Most of the houses here have cracks in the walls. They really need to be pulled down. But we've got nowhere else to go,” she says. The women of Batn el-Baqara are very resourceful. Some of them sell cold drinks, crisps and snacks from their tiny homes or work making tea and coffee for the drivers at the microbus station. Um Samah and her disabled husband have three children. She is the family's sole breadwinner, selling shoes to try and make a living. Their home is on the verge of collapse and she dreads the moment when it will have to be demolished. Ramlet Boulaq near Maspero, el-Sharabiya near Ramses and Rod el-Farag in Shubra are also very poor districts, where large families live in tiny shacks made from cardboard, tin, plastic and wood. These 'homes' are entirely unfit for human habitation. Um Rami lives with her seven children in their shack in Ramlet Boulaq. “We have no clean drinking water, sewerage or electricity. We have to buy containers of drinking water for LE2, but we can only afford to use it for cooking. “I'd love it if we could live in an apartment with a balcony, with the sun shining through the windows every morning,” she says wistfully. Um Rami's neighbour, a woman called Tafida, is in her seventies. This old lady looks after her grandchildren, whose mother has died. She has no money and no work, and has to rely on the neighbours and charities to help her. “If only the officials took pity on us. Don't they realise we are human beings too?” she asks.
