FOUR
Brooding and Bureaucracy

April, 2005
We lost our humor this month. After three months of living in close quarters with Hani’s family (unfailingly welcoming but nonetheless with their own schedules, habits and pursuits),…and working (fruitlessly) to get our lives set up, our furniture in our apartment, and our car on the pot-holed Cairo streets, we lost it.

What a steaming bowl of bureaucratic hell we’ve been supping on here. Really, it’s numbing. I refuse to believe Hani’s occasional exasperated conspiratorial proclamations that the systems were actually designed to antagonize people. I know that systems have a way of morphing from their well-intentioned beginnings to beady-eyed, tentacled beasts that suck the life force out of you. Foucault said so, though he might have used slightly different wording.

We have faced delays in every corner of our extended “set-up period” here, from getting residency Visas, bank accounts, land phones, cell phones, and internet access, to dealing with customs for our personal goods and our car (the latter of which yet resides in some nebulous “holding area” near the coast). It feels like a full time job: we visit offices every single day, get signatures and stamps, talk with this teller or that (when they deign to interrupt their cup of tea or casual conversation with colleagues). We wait for hours…and then are told to come back next week. When we return the following week, it is the same rigmarole.
We wait,
and wait,
(and scream a silent little scream),
and wait.

We finally did get our furniture and boxes to our three-months-past-paid apartment last week. Il-hamdulileh. But we had to pay an arm and a leg for it. Who knew that our thrift store couch and garage sale clothes, dishes and videos could be valued at thousands and thousands of dollars by our calculating customs agents, and subsequently be subject to 40% customs fees plus 15% sales tax. Ok, ok, we had SOME new things, and we had a profound amount of crap generally (how we fit it into our erstwhile 598 square foot UCSD graduate student apartment can only be guessed), but it didn’t stop our mouths from dropping when we heard how much we had to pay to get our goods in: fifteen hundred dollars. And apparently this was down from their original levy of about seven thousand dollars (so our intermediary agent, he had us know, saved us quite a bit). And the $1500 is on top of the “release” fee, the “holding” fee, the bribes ($500 alone), random costs for letters we had to obtain (of affiliation with AUC, of authorization to give Power of Attorney to our agent, etc), the overland shipping and the agent’s immodest fees. Over three thousand total, plus the 3k to ship, plus the 1k to move from Sandy Eggo to L.A., plus the months of headache….

And all of our things didn’t even make it to us. Apparently our customs officials liked the looks of a number of our items so they helped themselves to the bounty. It is an eclectic combination of things they lifted: random drinking glasses, a package of cookies, two new toothbrushes (taken out from a set of 7; at least they weren’t greedy), toothpaste, a sofa cushion, video cables, CDs, a dish draining rack, a pair of new squash shoes (which they brazenly replaced with a cheap pair of Egyptian shib-shib or slippers, right in the box), the list goes on.

So just a note to anyone casually considering shipping anything to Egypt: don’t.

The humbling thing is that regular Egyptians have to endure such things ALL THE TIME. The bureaucracy and graft and delays are all a part of everyday life here. And it is worse for the locals, of course. We waltz into drab, non-descript, non-identifiable buildings toting backpacks and small children in earthy-crunchy gnawed-at-till-the-stuffing-shows slings,…slice through the wall-to-wall smoke and people and are immediately spotted by enterprising young semi-professionals who will do most of the work for us. We need a formal statement of Power of Attorney to enable our agent to go to Alexandria to grease the wheels and get our stuff out of its lonely three-month-long container prison? “Mefish mishkela” (no problem). “Step right into our (slightly less smoky) office.” Because for a 1000% mark up, they will push the form through, get the signatures, and get us out of there in a mere three hours. Three hours. It’s hard enough entertaining the kids for this long without toys or places to comfortably nurse and play, but this was with the universal bureaucratic accelerator: filoos ($$$). Most of the people there could not afford the special treatment that a hundred and twenty Egyptian pounds (about $20) buys. I saw one woman perched on a hard, dusty bench in the hallway holding children younger than ours. She sat impassive amidst the sea of bustling (mostly male) traffic and din. Even her children were calm and quiet (had they learned already to be so patient? Most middle class American kids would be climbing the walls after 20 minutes.). When we asked the people helping us how long she would have to wait we were told casually, “Oh three or four days,…maybe two if she’s lucky.”

It both boggles our minds and humbles our huffing incredulity.

In the face of this people maintain their sanity in a number of ways. They use humor (naturally one of my favorite strategies). Egyptians have a dry wit, a penchant for exaggeration and great ease with laughter. I find even ordinary (i.e., unintentionally humorous) utterances amusing. I remember once at my mother-in-law’s apartment when a plumber had to be called back because a faucet he had supposedly fixed had gone leaky again. He came at around 9pm (an ordinary hour for service calls, doctors and dentist appointments, visiting). He was shame-faced and contrite, mutely carrying his tool box. Hani’s younger brother opened the door, eyed the man, sighed dramatically and said, “Oh, it is a dark night for you, my friend!” The poor sod shuffled in and got to work.

Once when I was at a restaurant with Hani and some old friends of his I didn’t get to sit down and eat (thank you Quinlan and Sophia) until the entire table was standing and readying themselves to leave. I (starving) furiously waved off the gaggle of waiters poised to take my food and commenced, half-standing, half-crouching, to stuff great amounts of pasta, salad and soup into my mouth. The man to my right leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “Quick, put it in your pocket, you can take it to go!”

Of course, people employ other strategies as well. They practice what I’ll euphemistically call proactivity, which is to say they drive, walk and otherwise move where they want to go without regard for pre-existing lines or unspoken queing arrangements (you know, the silent agreement that the first person who enters a store or restaurant should get served before the person who comes in after them…). People walk, entirely without compunction, to the front counters of stores, ticket offices and outdoor shops, shouldering past everyone else (raising the ire of some and eliciting a fatalistic shrug from others) and buy or ask for what they want. There is not even a suggestion of shame or chagrin over it. And judging from other people’s reaction, this behavior is perfectly acceptable, even if annoying.

So. After three and a half months, we are still moving in. We are still wading through our list(s) of things to do. The electrician has to come (again), as does the refrigerator repair guy, the air conditioning repair man, the carpenter, the plumber, the water heater man, the guy to install the washer, the guy to seed the strip of dirt in our back patio…

The car will be another 4 weeks, so the kids and I will ride in the other half of the taxi cabs in Cairo, hunkering down in butt-worn back seats, telling stories about SpiderZain and other superheroes (against the melodic backdrop of Qur’anic recitations),…and breathing in the mingled incense of cigarette smoke and benzene (no scent caresses the nostrils like this heady combination). Hani will continue to risk his life by bicycle to run errands while we are away during the day. (Though it is my bike, I haven’t hopped aboard yet. As it is I am a walking spectacle-literally followed by groups of children at parks, and the recipient of more stares at the zoo than the animals. If we put me on wheels the whole damned city may come to a screeching halt at so fascinating a spectacle.

Enough complaint. I have achieved my catharsis. Things will get better. We have our fantastically expensive, newly-repaid-for goods now so we’re living large. Our car will come some day.

Some day….

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