Students' Projects
DMJX x PHOTOPIA
Mohamed Hozayen
If I move From Here I would Die
In the early morning she enjoys a cup of tea in her living room breathing the fresh air. She is my Grandma, and she lives in a narrow old street in the middle of Cairo. After days of local cafés operating at full capacity, people staying after midnight and kids playing in the streets, making noise, this area is a ghost district at night. You can smell the scent of these buildings and streets. Homes made of bricks and wood. The very same buildings and streets my childhood memories were made in.
When I was a little boy, I used to visit my grandma on weekends. I would play here, in this house and on this street. I see what it used to be and what it has become now. I still remember the old stairs and the games I used to play with the other relatives. I still remember how the ground shook under our feet when we jumped on the rooftop. I still go visit her every month. “I’ve lived here since 1952 when I got married and settled down. I’ve spent most of my life here in this house,” my grandma says.
“This area has witnessed my ups and downs. This is where I started my life, had my kids, and lived happy and sad moments. But now after my kids have left and have their own lives, I’m alone. But I still have my neighbors around me. I’m still surrounded by my neighborhood, the familiar sounds that go on till late into the night.”
That’s what keeps my grandma company so that she doesn’t feel lonely. But since the earthquake that hit Egypt In 1992, people started to think about moving to somewhere else because the buildings here have become weak. Buildings that witnessed changes in weather and natural disasters. But when the announcement of tearing down the first neighborhood came, more people left. Now, there are barely one or three people living in a building. They are the same people who you’d find working in the workshops, or the used clothes stores.
In 2011 the Egyptian government decided to take down all the old Informal residential buildings and districts. In 2016 this change came into effect in some places of the country. When they reached Maspero and Bulaq, two districts located on the Nile, they demolished them to make way for the new buildings. To compensate the inhabitants, they gave them two choices: Either take a small amount of money and leave or take a new apartment they cannot afford. These people had no choice but to leave their homes and were forced to leave behind their lives and struggle to start over somewhere else.
Now her life is a boring routine she is old lady she doesn’t move a lot all her life now inside these 2 rooms around her TV and Radio and her telephone . Waking up early morning, sometimes one of her sons passes by on his way to work to see if she needs anything. She sits in front of the TV watching anything with the volume turned onto the loudest. And in the big room, she keeps the radio turned on. Both have become her friends amidst her loneliness. She walks a little, cooks, drinks tea, and calls her relatives. But even though she is lonely, she can’t imagine being anywhere but here in her flat.
“I don’t want leave from here. This is my soul, my life, my everything. I would love to live in the dead silence instead of taking buildings down and forcing me to leave. My soul goes with this home and area.”
Mohammed Kotb
Misery of soft hands
Under the Necessarily Required, in a cruel career that needs the roughness of men, Nancy and her companions work.
Nancy and others, girls under 10 and 20 years of age, among schoolgirls who skipped schooling, and others who declined to marry because of duties, all of these are mixed by working in red brick factories, indeed, red brick factories, men's occupation, where roughness
Here... More than 20 factories have a staff of 50 to 60 employees in the same factory in the village of Burj Rashid and other villages in Al-Beheira governorate, of which 5 to 10 girls bring only bricks and move them From inside the warehouse for overseas freight vehicles.There are two sections of jobs in brick factories, the first part is the green party's employment, workers in the initial stages, and the second part is the red party, workers in the after-exit of the furnace bricks and do not know these names but those employed in the sector,
each group is separate of its own and has its own instructor..
Accounting for its staff and providing them the daily pay
Jobs in the Green Party are limited to men working with loaders, equipment and ovens, while girls are only permitted to work in the Red Party.
For each one's story understood, the surprise grows and can hit shock: "People are not in our position because at dawn we leave the house and come back in the afternoon and work in it."
We're going out, and all the people are sleeping, and no one of them feels like that. So what do we have to do
Mariam Atallah
The Runners of Cairo
You don’t need help to park your car, or do you?
Somewhere in Giza, a car is leaving its parking spot; a spot that isn’t always easy to find in the crowded streets of Egypt. As according to The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, there are more than 10 million registered vehicles in Egypt, half of them being in Cairo and Giza alone. Yasser, a 50-year-old runner, is standing next to that car, guiding it out and waving to the owner who may or may not pay him in return for his service. According to all laws and regulations, the car owner isn’t obligated to pay Yasser. However, some drivers do pay him. He guides every single car, and has been for the past 11 years, in search of those who decide to pay.
Yasser, and his family of 6, all live off that simple decision. His boys: Bassem, Bassam and Hammo have worked with him ever since they were kids. I want to say he taught them the job but there isn’t much to teach, they guide people into the available parking spots, people into