It is too hard to write this, it is very heavy to write this post.
I am waiting for a miracle, for divine intervention to make this stop so I won’t need to write anything because I feel too heavy, tired and frustrated as well as sad to speak about what is happening to those houseboats.
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We may not see this scene again in the upcoming days |
A couple of days ago, the Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation and Water source sent an eviction notice to the owners of 32 Nile houseboats in Imbaba’s KitKat area in Giza governorate.
Despite living for decades there and despite official maintenance bills for decades, the Ministry claims that their existence is illegal.
It is all over the news whether in New York Times, Ahram Online, BBC News, Reuters, Financial Times ABC News, AFP and others in the past week.
The Ministry has already begun to demolish some of the houseboats. They also moved a couple of them for huge sums of money to their warehouses.
I do not need to speak about the history of houseboats in Egypt and how they became part of old and modern Cairo’s visual heritage. It is explained in those links.