Holiday cheer among Cairo airport's exhaust fumes By Rami G. Khouri Daily Star staff Saturday, December 22, 2007
It was in the most unexpected and unlikely of places - the passenger buses at Cairo airport - that I encountered the holiday spirit this year. It's always hard to predict where the holiday spirit will strike, but it always does - an enchanting intersection where the human spirit and holiday cheer come together. We walk away from the encounter more hopeful, even more secure in the feeling that we are protected by the innate goodness of our fellow human beings, decent people whose zest for life and beauty is greater than a proclivity for suffering and death.
Finding all this in the passenger buses at Cairo airport is a tale of multiple ironies, which makes it all the more enchanting.
First, about buses. I am a lifelong bus aficionado. My ideal holiday is leisurely riding urban buses in big cities like New York, Paris or Berlin, reading newspapers, watching the people and enjoying the passing cityscape. Urban buses are mobile anthropology labs, veritable miniature cities in themselves.
Most bus riders follow daily routines, making an urban bus ride a familiar and comfortable experience. Passengers often get to know drivers personally, exchanging greetings, stories, sometimes holiday cookies. Familiarity and regularity on the bus breed a comforting combination of relaxation, predictability, security - always combined with the unpredictable thrill, and occasional extravaganza, of the bustling city outside the bus window.
Making the whole experience even more enjoyable is the technology - the bus is usually spacious, the windows are large, the loud purring-grinding sound of the engine is enchanting in its own way, and, most of all, the low-intensity rhythmic roll and bounce of the ride is always relaxing. Not since our extended ride in the maternal womb do we enjoy that rare juxtaposition of an enveloping human environment, within a safe space, moving through an enchanted urban landscape.
Next, about Cairo, and Egypt. This city and country have struck a combination of awe and panic in the human heart for thousands of years, affirming both the magnificence and mediocrity of the human adventure. The powerful, relentless humanity of Cairo's residents today contrasts deeply with their worsening social, economic, political and environmental conditions.
My balance sheet shows that about half of all routine transactions and encounters in Cairo - ordering a taxi, using the internet at a hotel, finding what is on a restaurant menu, getting served at a bank, making an appointment with a government official - do not function smoothly. Everything gets done eventually, but with extra effort and sometimes extra payments. The single most distressing symbol of contemporary Egypt is the public sector employees who ask for money in a variety of subtle or direct ways, including various government and private security staff. This is the inevitable consequence of a low-income economy that depends heavily on international tourism.
Airport passenger buses defy all the rules that make urban buses such a pleasant and meaningful experience. They offer a totally cold and anonymous human encounter; the driver is isolated in his or her cabin; you normally have to stand, often in packed conditions. The other passengers are strangers; the landscape of the route is intriguing if you like airplanes, but lacks urban magnificence; the ride is short, jerky, unsatisfying.
When I boarded my bus at Cairo airport a few days ago to catch my plane to Amsterdam, I was struck by a delightful sight: The sides of all the buses were decorated with colored ribbons tied into the shapes of roses. I checked around and saw that all the buses were similarly decorated, with four or five decorations on each side.
Intrigued by who did this nice deed, when we reached our plane I asked a uniformed airport or airline official standing near the stairs, "Why are these buses decorated with colored roses?"
"To greet and honor you in this holiday season!" he replied with a big smile.
"Whose idea was it to decorate the buses?" I asked.
"The bus drivers decided to do it themselves," he told me.
Lacking time and opportunity to verify this information, I assumed his explanation was correct. I was warmed inside, smiled outside, boarded my plane, and left Egypt reassured that the Egyptian and Arab human spirit remained strong, indomitable, generous and joyous.
Presumably the Cairo airport bus drivers were making their little gesture for the simultaneous holiday seasons of Adha for Muslims and Christmas for Christians. The incongruity was one reason I was so touched by the decorative roses - drivers who we would never know by name or in person went to the trouble of buying or making colored ribbon roses and attaching them to their buses, adding a touch of color and holiday spirit to an otherwise overpoweringly boring and slightly dehumanizing experience.
Most things in their lives - anonymous, repetitive work, squeezed family budgets, worsening environmental conditions, stultifying political controls - would tend to prod the Cairo airport bus drivers toward indifference, perhaps even resentment at the thousands of people who had money and time to ride their buses to the planes that would take them to faraway lands. They seem to have resisted that call to antipathy, and instead reached for roses made of colored ribbons.
I wonder that maybe it was not the drivers alone. Maybe the airport administration bought and mounted the roses. Or Egypt Air or some consortium of organizations and individuals at Cairo airport. It does not really matter who decorated the buses, I realized. What matters is that despite all of Egypt's problems, all the Arab world's tensions and violence, all of Cairo's pressures and stresses, the passenger buses at Cairo airport are resplendent with colored roses of ribbons this Christmas and Adha season - to greet you, the visitor, the passenger, the fellow human being passing through Cairo airport, to say to you: Merry Christmas and a Blessed Adha.
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