EGYPT: Thousands of fishing families in Cairo live on small boats on the river, forced off of dry land by poverty and overpopulation

In the overpopulated urban sprawl that is today's Cairo, millions of poor Egyptian families fall through the social net, and are lucky if they are able to put a roof over their heads and food on the table. But some of the families that make their living fishing along the Nile have been forced completely off of dry land. For several generations, thousands of families in Cairo have been living on small boats on the river. In Giza, these families live in the shadow of the luxury apartment blocks of the Kubri Abbas district. The seasons have changed suddenly in Cairo this year, and as the biting cold of winter looms, there is little protection for the poor families who live, sleep, marry and sometimes die on their small fishing boats on the Nile. For Mahmoud, who lives on a boat that measures no more than 4 by 2 metres with his mother, brother and bride of three months, Amani, subsistence is the narrow end of a bargain between God and the river. "At the end of the day, I throw my net and if God blesses me with catching fish, I save them for the next morning and then I go and sell them," said Mahmoud. "My wife takes the fish and goes to the market, and then we go and buy our things. And every day is like this, she goes to the market, sells the fish and she buys things and we eat and drink in the boat," he added. In the precarious shelter that is their home, Mahmoud and his family live out their lives, fishing, cooking, eating, sleeping, and dreaming of a future beyond the meagre existence they have carved out on the ancient river that cuts through the teeming metropolis of 18 million. The government has tried to help the fishing families before with offers of cheap housing. But these families have lived hand-to-mouth since they were born, and cannot pay the deposits needed to move into an apartment or the everyday bills that come with it. As winter arrives, Amani says that the river becomes even harder to plough. "When the winter comes I feel very cold and we don't catch any fish, we feel very tired in the winter. In the summer, the sun is facing us, but even then we don't find fish. It's very hard," she says. It is not only the vagaries of the river that burden the fishing families that live on the Nile. Life is a constant struggle with the Egyptian authorities as well, with the suspicious police often cracking down hard on them for out-of-date or expired fishing permits, which are difficult to acquire in the first place. Like thousands of others who live in their boats and cast their nets in the Nile's polluted waters, Mahmoud was born on the river. His mother and his now deceased father also fished, and if he and Amani have children, they will inherit the same trade as their parents. To be sure, some families who live on the river have grown accustomed to their lifestyle and have no desire to surrender it. But Om Mahmoud [the Mother of Mahmoud] dreams of a roof and four walls to protect her family, so that her children and future grandchildren can go to school, and find jobs in the city. "I wish that we had a place above [on land] to live, and that the kids, for example, had a job, so we could get out of the water. That's all," she said. The apartment blocks of Giza tower over the Nile where a small dock of fishing boats cradles the poor families that have no home but the rickety boats on which they live and grow old. In a city overwhelmed by poverty and an ever-spiralling population, where the poor sometimes live in empty lots, in-between buildings and amongst graveyards, the fishing families who came to Cairo in search of a better life are now imprisoned by the river that delivered them here and which so tenuously sustains them.

ITN Source | November 16, 2006

Tags:. .difficult. .beyond. .urban. .measures. .marry