floating

2006/11/20

differences

How different the world behind the veil really is. How free of judgments and detached from time it seems. Ironic detached from time, but marked with time, with past that feeds this country instead of the granary it once was it became the cradle of history. Detached from judgments we know and full with judgments foreign to us.

We are aliens in our sterile environment (the bus) looking down on them who sleep on their little grass patches in the huge yellow stone wasteland. They may seem poor to us, but they have what matters, they have what we will never have. They may seem unclean to us but their souls are purer than a tear our western world forbids us to shed.

They live out of the things we could die of.

They say there are no what we call Nile horses (hippopotamuses) here, well I saw a few horses and they were swimming the Nile not willingly though, I think. They see this and yet they don’t let small things like that stop them from drinking the water from the mother-river. The smell and taste of carcass can be exorcized with boiling, yet it is another way to drink from the well that gave them life, yet another try not to eat from xenophobes’ hand.

To buy water must be luxury they can hardly afford which is only my guess when I compare the prices to oil: 1,5 liter of water costs 1,30 LE while 1 liter of oil costs around 1 LE I think. It is something we could never imagine: we think how unfair it is we have so much bigger prices of oil, but we never think that one can never drink oil instead of the water; we never think how unfair it is from them to have such low salaries.

We forgot that Drava is still drinkable, all we would have to do is compare it to the Nile.

We are aliens to each other on this small planet, different things kill us, we have different musts and shoulds; we are all human though and differences should be put aside, we should realize that there is one must common to all of us.

Labels: cairo, differences, nile

posted by calamity @ 11/20/2006 10:18:00 pm

1 Comments:

At 22/11/06 2:10 pm, Aisha said…

wow that's beautiful. i always thought that the richer you get, the more you lose some kind of purity of the soul.. i look at simple farmers, from any country, and i see a simpleness and a humbility that i don't see in anyone else, and i wish i could have that. there's something so carefree about them.. and they have a certain transparency - there's nothing fake about them.

beautiful post calamity, :)
i always wanted to go to egypt, but i want to more than ever now!