her ignorance.
A little boy from the row in front turns to Habir, presses his thumb as firmly as he can into his own palm and shows her the remaining four fingers.
‘Mahmoud! You know what the rules are. Tell me how many apples there are if every one of you has the number of apples I want to hear Habir say.’
The boy turns away immediately and starts counting up on his fingers. It’s gone even quieter.
Meanwhile Rania has gone over to young Habir’s table. She puts down two pieces of chalk. Then two more.
First the girl looks up at her with huge, frightened eyes. Slowly she turns her gaze to the small, white sticks on the table in front of her. She agonises, closes her eyes, leans back and stares straight ahead again.
‘They‘re not apples,’ a mystery voice enlightens them all from the back.
‘Habir! Two and two are…’ Rania tries patiently to help and places all four pieces of chalk on the table at the same time. She crouches down to put herself at the same level as the girl’s desk.
‘I don’t know,’ the child says with a sob in her voice and cradles her face in her arms with the shame of it all. She starts to cry. Not even the gentlest of words can console her.
There were touching moments aplenty that day. But the impact of witnessing this girl’s despair at not being able to do simple addition went beyond all other emotions. Later on, when she was skipping around at break with the other girls, she was shouting out the answer the whole time. ‘Four! Four! Four! I know the answer! Four!’
Perhaps she’d been nervous. Maybe my being there had unsettled her. And yet once Rania had explained to me that little Habir had only been attending school regularly for a couple of weeks and that she suffered from severe learning difficulties, I thought it highly likely she’d still struggle if asked to imagine three plus three bananas instead of two plus two apples.
I was in Manshiet Nasser, a settlement in Cairo roughly halfway between the centre and the Al Azhar University, situated at the foot of the Muqattam range of hills. More than six hundred thousand Egyptians live here. The majority of the homes and hovels had been thrown up illegally over several decades. And still hundreds upon hundreds of people went on moving in, people who hadn’t managed to make a go of things elsewhere in the city, people who had no choice other than to live in these wrecks of largely unfinished buildings.
Informally, as the city council likes to describe it, the Zabbaleen, or rubbish collectors, have also settled here. Nobody knows their exact number. Estimates suggest sixty thousand. With their donkey-carts piled high or their mini pickups, mostly clapped out, they’re immediately known to everybody as an indispensable part of the Cairo street scene. Thousands of families, mostly Coptic Christians, work not only as supplementary rubbish collectors but many more specialise in marshalling and recycling a huge range of materials.
The moment you drive into the area you can’t miss the mountains of plastic bottles, cans, old textiles or cardboard. Dozens of huge, white refuse sacks made out of jute are stacked alongside one another. Collections of metal, glass and food waste lay next to them. Scrapped electricals, pieces of cable and wood. The more expensive the raw materials, the more men there are hanging around to guard them. Instructions are being barked out. Voices shout for order. Tons of this rubbish is stored in derelict clinker buildings. It extends from one corner to the next and from street to street. The stink of rubbish, decay and decomposition is almost overpowering. Countless cats and their pups are on the prowl. Pigs are being kept in a roughly built pen in a backyard. A swarm of carts and trucks trundle back and forth, loaded to the gunnels with the overnight pickings from every nook and cranny in the city.
Further east is the huge cave church of St Sama’an, the largest Coptic church in the Middle East. On high days and holidays it is packed and more than ten thousand faithful pray within these impressive architectural surroundings. I had arranged to meet her halfway there. She was on time, as she politely but firmly made it clear on the phone to me while I sat in a taxi waiting for the dispersal of a traffic jam caused by a small delivery truck.
The smells emanating from every pore of this district were now well-nigh intolerable and my ears were being subjected to an unbearable level of noise. Children and youngsters darted here and there, climbed up on the waste tips or gave the men a hand. Weighty sacks were emptied or filled, then dropped moments later onto a loading area. Enormous container trucks waited to receive recycling materials. A bulldozer and a digger made endless deliveries. If something fell to the ground then it had to be retrieved come what may. Then at last. I was on the way out of this stench and roar. I could see her some way off. She was flagging down a taxi. She got in. Her freshness and energy did not really sit well with this environment, I thought as we greeted one another. I still had no idea just how extraordinary this day was going to turn out.
Rania isn’t her real name. When we’d arranged this meeting, she’d made it extremely clear that neither her identity nor any photos were to be published. She explained her fear of what she described as unpleasantness from the authorities because sooner or later I was going to ask her about the conditions which marked out the whole dilemma facing school policy in Egypt. This is where anonymity is a useful self-preservation tool. The system and those upholding it did not welcome any critical voices.
Rania was a teacher from another district. She was in her late twenties, married with two children. She came here once a week, to one of those poor districts of Cairo that is Manshiet Nasser, to the Rubbish Collectors’ slums, to do voluntary work with five other teachers at the school run by the organisation, Stephen’s Children.
The building extends over two floors and does have windows and doors, one feature alone which sets it apart from the numerous ruined buildings in the neighbourhood. Donations and extemporised art shows have made its existence possible. The welfare people call this sort of place a communication centre, a place where help of all types is available. The charity runs ninety centres like this across the whole city.
Maggie Gorban, the figure central to the leadership of Stephen’s Children, and Cairo’s Mother Theresa, as she is referred to with as much reverence as admiration, has meanwhile become known far beyond the borders of Egypt. The sixty-five year old former computer science academic has been nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has involved herself in social flash-points between Christianity and Islam and speaks on behalf of the slum dwellers with a particular focus on the Copts, and yet also for those with no declared faith. However extraordinary this merciful soul and mother to all street children was, however appealing the prospect of perhaps meeting her the same day if her time and work permitted her to do so was, it was actually to meet another woman that I had come here. That woman was now sitting next to me and struggling to put into words the full scale of a catastrophe.
It was the main break of the day. Maths was done, reading and writing were next on the agenda. I was watching little Habir’s playfulness. Her tears had dried. She was skipping about quite happily. She ran past us several times and proudly called out that she knew what two and two made.
‘I could have wept with her,’ Rania suddenly burst out, took a deep breath and looked at the carefree child whose future was, as she added without emotion, sealed at birth.
For a moment I didn’t know what to say.
‘Sometimes I think it’s better to stay in ignorance. If you’re happy, that is.’
Again there was nothing to say in response.
‘Well then. Whatever.’ After a short silence, she began to offload her feelings. She gave me a quick overview of the basic features of the Egyptian school system and sketched out how the ideal school-life would conclude with the start of a course of study at university or, after the appropriate professional training, the start of a professional career. From her own sphere of work she had, in addition, an insight into the work of a commission which had recently formulated some proposals for reform of part of the education system.
That was how I knew her. Nonconformist and determined. Prior to my visit to this school I had met her on two previous