The failure of the Egyptian state manifests itself in mundane ways such as the lack of maintenance of city sidewalks.
The more I travel in MENA, the more I realize how different each state/city/community is both within and across borders. On the other hand, terrible, cracked, dangerous, craggy, pocked sidewalks, if one has been paved at all, are a constant from Morocco to Syria to Jordan to Egypt and likely beyond. In my rush to make it to Hardee's before the 3am closing time after Istiqlal (Independence) Day activities, I tripped and skinned my arm and hand in a way that looks more gruesome that it actually is. Thus, even though I enjoyed the taxi ride home from the movies tonight in large part because the driver verbally abused a man in a pink shirt for walking in the street instead of on the sidewalk, I found myself able to sympathize for the pink shirt man. And I learned the word for sidewalk ( رصيف ).
Other failures of the state are more heinous and detrimental. Trash disposal and collection across the developing world are problematic due to underfunding and lack of oversight and planning. In Egypt there are designated communities whose residence undertake the responsibility of removing residential trash. Once collected, it fills the narrow, winding streets and the crevices of vacant, abandoned street front spaces in the communities where the collectors live. It is the men of the garbage collector communities who gather the refuse and the women who separate it and in the case of The Association for the protection of the Environment (APE) are able to create products from some of the waste. APE's work is amazing, but a visit to the facility reveals the clichéd pattern of women working and men overseeing. APE's current director happens to be a woman, which is refreshing, but the pattern otherwise is woefully familiar in the few grassroots development schemes I have witnessed in Cairo, including Fathet Kheir.
Inequality between men and women is certainly not the only dyad of uneven relationships. Nonetheless, it is the official policy of the Mubarak government to ignore and deny violence against women in Egypt, including (and especially) harassment. I went to the Renaissance Nile City Cinema specifically to see Amr Saad's movie. Amr Saad is neither particularly famous nor particularly talented. His appeal lies in the fact that he played Khalid, a character from the series of Arabic language textbooks called Al-Kitaab. Unsubstantiated rumor has it that he denies this work, which has made him famous among Anglophone students of Arabic. In addition, Yallabina was unduly vague with the description of the plot. All told, the movie دكان شحاته (Shehata's Produce) was both remarkable and predictable. The opening credits featured a stunning flashback sequence of headlines and sound bites; however, the film itself failed to live up to the amazing opener. Typically overacted and featuring the requisite misplaced/inappropriate slapstick, the main character Shehata (played by Saad) is loathsome in his weakness and passivity. The more disturbing aspects of the film featured a rape scene in which the victim's brother, her lifelong, best friend (and almost sister-in-law) and another community member hold her down while her beloved's brother rapes her as an official challenge to her chastity. In sum, while not a fantastic production, دكان شحاته is provocative and worth seeing, if only for the kitsch of Amr Saad.
Finally, to conclude this pregnant, bloated post, I visited the first church ever erected for Saint Simon the cobbler (Cave Churches of Samaan el Kharraz) and did not receive a satisfying answer to my query as to the reason behind the pallor of Jesus' and Mary's skin in the iconography. I am apparently extra argumentative in the Arab world.
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