A Day In The Life Of Mother Earth : Crowded Cairo : ‘There’s no housing in Cairo at all; people are living in tombs!’ Hayam Abdel Salem, <i> Cairo area resident</i>

* The Problem--Overpopulated Cities

* The U.N. View--”By the year 2025, 60% of the Earth’s population will live in cities. Degradation of the environment and human living conditions is already seen in cities, particularly in developing countries.”

* The Case Study: Cairo--While not the largest, Egypt’s capital is one of the world’s most crowded cities and ranks near the bottom for livability.

If there is a vortex of disorder, a place where the chaos of the world gathers itself and spins around a dreadful heart, it is Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Nowhere in the world, it seems, are so many going simultaneously in different directions that lead nowhere. Each day, smoking buses lurch in from all over the city, stuffed so full that passengers dangle out the doors and occasionally eject into the street at a dead run. Throngs of cars careen in inexplicable directions, dodging waves of pedestrians whose fearless assaults eventually bring the cars to a honking, fuming halt. Motorcycles, often carrying entire families, dart through the lanes of stalled cars. An occasional donkey cart picks through the melee. Ambulances wink and wail and wait with the others.

Tahrir is the meeting place of every important boulevard in downtown Cairo--in addition to being the city’s largest metro stop, the headquarters of the Egyptian state bureaucracy, the Foreign Ministry, the national museum, two major hotels, several dozen restaurants, cafes and souvenir shops and the offices of the Arab League. It is the destination that causes taxi drivers to shake their heads and raise their fares. Like much of Cairo, it is an urban planner’s nightmare.

To spend a day in Cairo, the Middle East’s largest metropolis, is to see a city that is the cultural and intellectual capital of the Arab world and one of its worst problems.

With its 5,000-year-old Pyramids and ancient mosques whose singing minarets tower over drab, sand-colored high-rises and flashing neon Coca-Cola signs, Cairo is at once the “Mother of the Earth,” as the Egyptians like to refer to it, and a teeming Third World mega-city of 14 million whose proportions long ago began bursting out of the envelope.

Cairo has marched insatiably back from the banks of the Nile in recent decades, spreading new tenements, roads, luxury high-rises and garbage dumps on more precious agricultural land than was fertilized by the Aswan High Dam; an estimated 1,500 acres a year fall victim to unlicensed, uncontrolled urban growth. There will be 2,050 new Cairo residents today; an Egyptian baby is born every 23.2 seconds.

The city that was once an Oriental delight of tree-shaded boulevards, grand villas, splendid gardens and gracious colonial and Art Deco-style apartments and offices has become unlivable for much of its population.

The Egyptian Academy of Scientific Studies in 1990 reported that more than half of Cairo’s residents use sleeping pills and other sedatives to escape the mind-shattering noise of honking horns, shouted arguments at street corners, thousands of mosques with loudspeakers, musical bands with high-tech amplifiers along the river and men wandering through the streets screaming “Mangoes” or “Locks Fixed!”

Nearly a third of the population has high blood pressure.

Nor is the noise the only health hazard. With factory- and auto exhaust-driven lead levels among the highest in the world, plus an estimated 100 to 200 tons of polluted fallout that rain on every square mile of the city each month, the air is literally killing the population.

From Tahrir Square it is about half an hour’s drive to Helwan, where cement factories rain choking dust over what was once a world-famous health spa. Hundreds are believed to have died from the effects of toxic sulfur dioxide emissions, and the local Fevers hospital accepts daily admissions for bronchitis, asthma and emphysema.

Dr. Mostapha Zahabi of Cairo’s Qasr Eini Hospital says he traced 30 cases of mental retardation in a primary school in the community of Maasara, just north of Helwan, to breathing of the polluted air.

An estimated 600 tons of garbage a day--about a tenth of what’s generated--goes uncollected on the streets, feeding millions of stray cats, dogs and rats and leading to additional disease problems.

To venture into Cairo past the downtown boulevards and tourist sites is to see at once some of the worst poverty on Earth and a city with an incredible vibrancy in which millions of Egyptians eke lives and neighborhoods out of conditions most outsiders would dismiss as unlivable.

In the fashionable neighborhoods of Zamalek and Maadi, dark-skinned doormen in white turbans, known as bowabs, help carry groceries, fetch keys and wash cars for perhaps $70 a month. Many sleep on mats under a stairway and cook their dinner at sunset on a small glass burner to the sound of the Koran from an old portable radio discarded by a tenant.

In the teeming neighborhoods of Imbaba, on the Giza side of the Nile, and in Shobra and Bulaq, behind the luxurious Ramses Hilton, crowding is among the heaviest in the world, with an estimated 120,000 people per square kilometer in their densest sections.

Streets become so narrow that laundry hanging on the balconies flutters into the laundry from across the street. New stories are built on top of old buildings, and squalid huts are built on the roofs of these new stories. Hundreds of thousands of people live on Cairo’s rooftops.

Frequently, the buildings crumble and simply collapse, leaving many of their residents dead in the wreckage.

In the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis last month, 30 police officers evacuated an apartment building that was double the height allowed in its building permit after a pillar collapsed on the ground floor. Furious residents attacked the sons of the owner with knives and sticks.

“We cannot control it. It’s a problem,” admits Mahmoud Youssef, Cairo’s deputy governor, during an interview at his office in the towering bureaucratic headquarters at Tahrir Square.

He estimates that at least 5,000 buildings in Cairo have been illegally built in excess of city height restrictions. Since Cairo firemen do not have the equipment to fight blazes in buildings higher than 12 stories, the results are often disastrous. A luxury high-rise in the well-heeled suburb of Maadi burned down earlier this year as residents jumped from the balconies to their deaths.

Driving out from Tahrir again, this time toward the old quarters in the east, it becomes clear that some Cairenes have despaired of finding a home among the living. The vast old cemeteries on the city’s eastern edge have over the years become filled with families who have taken up residence among the tombs. The City of the Dead is now home to some 200,000 people--perhaps as many as half a million--and some quarters now have running water and electricity.

On this day, trenches are being dug in the streets of the Qait Bey district to install telephones in the carved, arched tombs. A group of boys kicks a soccer ball between the graves, and a 69-year-old man, Abdullah, a retired oil company employee, feeds his pigeons.

Several of the pigeons have lovely fanned tails like peacocks. They are housed in a large cage in Abdullah’s living room, a chamber in a 17th-Century Mameluke burial complex with a sky-blue arched ceiling. Near the cage is the man’s bed, a television set, a vase of flowers and a cassette tape player. He has lived in the cemetery with his five children, he says, since 1967.

“When I first moved here, there was no electricity at all, and I used to sit out until the sun went down and there was nowhere in the city that was so quiet,” Abdullah says. He stretches a hand toward the pigeon cage.

“Listen! The Yemeni (bird) is calling now,” he says. “They speak at the five prayer times, and they remind us of the need to repent. . . .” His voice trails off in the twilight stillness.

“The truth is that Cairo is still the greatest place on earth,” he says finally. “Cairo is the heart of Egypt, and anyone who tastes it never forgets it.” He lights a cigarette with long, brown fingers. “And it’s also the cheapest.”

Lots of people think so. Like other growing Third World cities, Cairo’s boom is built not only on the large families that Egyptians tend to have but also on an inexorable move into the city from the farming villages--about 100,000 migrants a year. The fact that a third of the city’s population is under the age of 18 makes it a virtual certainty that future growth will be almost unimaginable.

The government’s first line of defense has been to construct a series of “new cities” in the desert outside Cairo with names harkening back to famous Egyptian battle victories like “Tenth of Ramadan” and “Fifth of May.” But because they have lots of plants and factories--but no telephones, few schools and infrequent bus service--most of their new apartment buildings are empty hulks.

Last month, the government lost a controversial court battle in which it tried to move the old, rat-infested Rod Al-Farag fruit and vegetable market to a $33-million site in a new city. The plan caused fury among the vendors. “Long live justice!” they shouted outside the courthouse as the verdict was read.

It took 300 riot police in March to shut down the 60-year-old Zeitoun slaughterhouse, which sent blood and water running through the streets of nearby residential neighborhoods and cast a putrid smell over the entire area. But many butchers have refused to go to the new, $20-million mechanized slaughterhouse at Bassateen south of Cairo, so the facility is operating at well below capacity.

Now, driving back in toward downtown past some of the city’s most historic mosques, the even-larger Sayed Al-Zeinab slaughterhouse, 120 years old, is operating with foul abandon near the heart of the Old City. Only yards away from one of Cairo’s most populated districts, sheep, camels, cows and goats are dispatched by the thousands, their throats slit according to Islamic custom.

In many of the neighborhoods in this quarter, raw sewage runs through the streets and, mixing with rising ground water, washes into the foundations of ancient Islamic monuments, rotting their cores and eating away at their precious carvings. Cairo’s sewage system, built in the 1940s for a city of 2 million, long ago was overrun and will be until at least next year, when a new $1.2-billion system, billed as the largest construction project in the world, is completed.

The city is doing other things to fight back. Next year, auto emissions controls for the smokiest offenders will begin to go into effect, says Youssef, the deputy governor, and a project is under way to install filters on the belching factories south of the city. Plans for 50,000 new government-built apartments are on the books to meet a demand of about four times that many each year. A total of about 200,000 have been built by the government since 1975.

Moving out from the old city toward its fringes, to the farm fields near the Pyramids that are disappearing under apartment buildings, to the clover pastures in the south that are being dug up and built over, Cairo’s real infrastructure problems become painfully apparent.

In the community of Torah, wedged against the Muqatam Hills behind the fashionable Maadi suburb, thousands of the zebaleen who pick up garbage from Maadi by day take it home and sort through it in the courtyards of their aluminum shacks by night.

This afternoon, a dozen or more children are playing on mounds of smoking garbage--there is a fanciful swing atop one heap--while pigs, chickens and dogs pick through the leftover rubbish.

Cairo is to receive an award at next week’s environmental conference in Rio for its work to build streets, recycling factories and schools in its zebaleen villages, turning them into thriving communities that collect and recycle the city’s massive amounts of garbage far better than a municipal collection service could. Torah is not one of these villages. Here, there are still no roads, no schools, no water, no electricity, no sewage system.

Hayam Abdel Salem, 26, lives in a one-room hut with her twin boys, age 5, her daughter, 7, and her husband, Shahat Ibrahim, who runs a small cigarette and candy shop out of the front of the house. She has lived in this smoking village for 15 years, since the day her husband claimed her from the oasis community of Fayoum.

She pulls out a package of X-rays and medical reports that show her heart has been so badly damaged from rheumatic fever that she must have surgery if she is to survive. Rheumatic fever, caused when infections generated in close, airless quarters are left untreated, is a relatively common disease in Cairo.

“They’re trying to move us out of here. The nuns want to throw us out in the street. They say this is not a good place to live. But there’s no housing in Cairo at all; people are living in tombs! I’m staying here,” she announces. “Not even the president is going to make me move.”

Wouldn’t it be better, she is asked, to find a new home somewhere else, where she would have electricity--and a place to use the toilet--and she wouldn’t have to haul water home in a jug? She scoffs, and then sighs. “Where am I going to go?” she says. “Where would I be able to go? Are you going to find a place for me to go to?”

Her husband, rising from his afternoon siesta, goes back to the dark corner where he sells his cigarettes and waits for customers. The huge disc of the sun, grown rusty orange through the afternoon smoke and haze, dips low toward the mounds of rubbish on the edge of the village.

“Praise God,” he says. “We are well.” Hayam turns without a word and goes back inside the house.