Tag: housing & services

Michaela Singer reports…

In 2003, the Housing Ministry, under the auspices of the First Lady, launched a campaign to provide housing for some of the poorest Cairo residents.
Five years later and white apartment blocks, Suzanne Mubarak’s ‘gift’ to the poor, pepper the landscape. But it is the slum housing, thickly crammed up the mountains of Manshiat Nasr, that dominate.
Tabbet Pharo’un, is a slum settlement of some 250 families, built into the steepest slopes of the Duweiqa rocky hills. Its ramshackle huts, which cling to the hillside are crude one-room shelters, that provide little protection to is residents.
But in the center of the slum lies a state of the art water storage tank, built especially for the new Suzanne Mubarak apartments, which are mainly empty.
“They started building the water tank two years ago,” Atif Muhammad, a resident told Daily News Egypt.
“When they came, they brought state security with them to guard the site.
The new apartments had already been there for a few years, and were still empty. They are built for us, and people around us, but the security presence prevent people from voicing demands. It was sheer intimidation.”
The water storage tank was completed last year. Since then the government proceeded to build pipes connecting the tank and the new buildings.
Residents claim that the building work has rocked their shacks’ foundations and upturned the ground bringing a plague of insects.
Ghada Abdel Moneim, 33, who lives directly opposite the tank with her husband and three children, was bitten by a scorpion as she was preparing dinner on a gas burner.
“I was taken to hospital immediately, and received the antidote, but others here, especially small children haven’t been so lucky,” she says.
Pointing to the rubble and rubbish next to her house, she explains that this area used to be belong to her neighbors.
“They stood in the way of the government when they came to build the pipes that connect the tank to the new buildings. They’ve only been here four years, but because they live right opposite the tank, they struck up a deal, and were given new housing, but we haven’t been moved.”
Climbing up a steep alley, one comes to the house of Suraya Abdel Qader Ali. Like many of the families, Ali came to Cairo from Upper Egypt in the 1980s. Finding nowhere else to live, she made her home in Duweiqa. But hanging precariously above her shack is a huge rock. Parts of it have already destroyed the roof of the neighbor’s room.
“The rock was secure when we first came here. But with the water and wind, it’s slowly eroding. We have complained to the local municipality, and the governorate office in Abdeen, but to no avail. An inspector came in his car, but didn’t even bother to get out. He looked out his window, and drove off,” said Suraya.
Reaching breaking point, the families staged a demonstration outside the Cairo governorate. On the week of June 15 they also demonstrated outside the local municipality, where security arrested four residents and held them for three days, then released without charge.