currently mesmerizing me
Sep. 29th, 2006 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmhttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060925.wxdead25/BNStory/International/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20060925.wxdead25
For decades, Cairo's Northern Cemetery -- a walled Mamluk-era necropolis better known as the City of the Dead -- has been home to tens of thousands of people who have made their homes inside the often extensive tombs that sometimes hold centuries-old bodies. They are some of the many urban poor who inhabit the Egyptian capital, forced to live among the dead by the overcrowding and unemployment that plague this city of 16 million.
...
Parts of the cemetery seem remarkably alive, as children in public-school uniforms head to and from schools located just outside the graveyard. They skip along the dirt paths between the burial chambers, ducking under the power lines and the drying laundry strung between the tombs.
...
Most who live here were born in the cemetery, got married here and have raised their families the same way they lived -- as if it were any other neighbourhood in Cairo.
"I don't like to go outside. I like it better here. Here is where I was born, where I work, where I live," says Abdel Aziz Faragh, a 47-year-old gravedigger who also runs the local convenience store out of the cemetery guardhouse.
