It's Friday, time for Um Ali to go shopping. One of the best places for her to shop is the famous Friday Market, under the Autostrade in the Imam el-Shafei district near the Moqattam Hills. It's a place where, even with a little money, she can shop like a queen. The market sells nearly everything that is popular among Cairo's poorest, who flock to the place to snap up secondhand items for reasonable prices. "Here you can find old furniture, used clothes, shoes, sewing machines, kitchen utensils and even animals," says Um Ali, describing the place she loves. But what is really amazing is that you can even buy secondhand food here! In corners of the market, there are several vendors selling food products that you can't find anywhere else. One of them sits on a stool with a portable table in front of him, covered in plates full of large pieces of cheese, remainders that big supermarkets were getting rid of. Um Ali makes a beeline for this vendor, who'll sell her a kilo of high-quality cheese for LE5 – in the shops, she'd pay more than LE40 for the same thing (if she could afford it). She'll use the cheese to make sandwiches for her children to take to school. The next vendor is selling crisps rejected by the manufacturers because they've got broken. "My children love crisps, but I can never afford them from the shop," explains Um Ali, who now moves on to the section of the market that sells meat products. Here women in black sell what are called the ‘meat lefts', the bits that don't look so inviting. But today Um Ali is in the mood for some chicken skeletons that are cheaper and can make a tasty soup. Um Ali is just one of the 20 per cent of Egyptians who fall below the poverty line and, according to recent statistics from the State-run Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), spend less than LE206 a month. Like many poor Egyptians, she's picked up a few tricks for coping with life's costs. For her, the definition of poverty is ‘to be unable to feed one's children and offer them shelter'. Like many poor Egyptians, Um Ali has learned to live on what the rich don't want. The rich, who represent a fifth of the nation's population, consumed nearly half of the national income last year. Um Ali is happy to get their old clothes and chicken bones. She thanks God for that, although she doesn't know how long it will last – perhaps the time will one day come when she can't even afford these humble things for her family. "Many of the people in Um Ali's position aren't as stoical as her. Indeed they might soon explode with anger if a change doesn't appear soon," according to sociologists, who warn that the number of poor people is increasing in Egypt. "The poor of today are not like the poor of the good old days who were satisfied and sometimes found poverty a blessing. Now they are very angry and might go berserk. The consequences could be terrible," predicts Saher el-Tawil, head of the Social Contract Centre, adding that a governmental project is underway, targeting the poorest 1,000 villages in Egypt. Saher added that special care should be given to the cities' shantytowns, which have become a den for a lot of social vices we never saw in the past. Through the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals, the world is addressing the many dimensions of human development, including halving by 2015 the proportion of people living in extreme poverty. However, in Egypt, 21.5 per cent of Egyptians lived below the poverty lines in 2008, jumping from 19.4 per cent in 2005, according to CAPMAS. Although other organisations put the number of the Egyptian poor at about 40 per cent, they all agree that Egypt, in the past few years, has made a lot of progress. But only the richest 20 per cent of the population are enjoying the fruits of this progress. Um Ali and millions of others live on the margins of the lives of this segment of the society that has consumed the fruits of economic reform. She is happy to be able to send her children to school, where the education is, as some people claim, free. She is happy with the secondhand clothes and food she buys at the Friday Market. For her poverty is to be unable to feed her children; she still feeds her children, regardless of the nature of the foods she puts in their stomachs.
