Learning to Live with Chaos

Let me tell you, Cairo is no Paris.

I have been living here for seven months now. The adjustment was hard, but I’ve come to love it, because it has changed my perspective on life and the world around me. I have many thoughts about living in Egypt as an American, a woman, and a member of the diplomatic community, so every few weeks I will send out a new essay distilling my experiences. I’m looking forward to sharing the weird and wonderful details of this journey with you. But first, let me introduce the setting.

You are probably curious about how Cairo looks and feels. I could ask you to picture the countless minarets, which poke the sky like a bed of needles. Or I could tell you about how the pyramids are just beyond city limits and loom over the highways. I could describe how polluted the air is, how the smell of fire, petrol, and cigarettes hits you as soon as you step off the plane. But those are things you can understand by looking at pictures, maps, weather reports. I want to talk about what Cairo is actually like—the character of the city, which you can only understand through experience.

Cairo is a living, breathing agent of chaos. And I don’t mean controlled chaos, like a child’s birthday party or Times Square on New Years’ Eve. I mean the completely unmitigated kind. The kind where middle aged women get into fistfights with young men in the bazaar (yes, I have witnessed this) and where the crowded sidewalks—if you’re lucky enough to find a sidewalk, that is—are boobytrapped with loose stones and exposed wires. This is the largest city on the African continent, with 10 million people (not counting the near suburbs) crammed into ramshackle high rises. Some unruliness comes with the territory. Yet police sit on every corner, and one would think they’d be able to maintain a modicum of order.

In my experience, that isn’t the case. There is a pervasive sense of anarchy here. I’m talking about a child driving a donkey cart the wrong way on the freeway, next to a family of 7 piled onto a single motorcycle, flanked by a truck hauling a tower of live pigeon cages, all while speeding mini buses weave in and out and leave barely enough room to swipe a credit card between them. I'm talking about people burning heaps of trash on the side of the road. I'm talking about the never ending parade of shoddy constructions that are either half-finished or half demolished—it’s never clear which—and buildings that simply vanish overnight. I’m talking about roving packs of feral dogs, and about the guy that appears out of nowhere to insist on helping you cross a busy street, only to demand a tip (baksheesh) for his trouble.

I’ve tried for months to understand why this anarchy exists, and I’ve finally landed on a theory. Here is the first part of it: Cairo is growing too fast for its people to develop any shared social norms or common operating logic.

By my back-of-the-envelope math, Cairo has doubled in size every 15-20 years since 1950. I don’t know exactly how many first-generation Cairenes that is, but it’s a lot. Compare that to New York, whose population hasn’t even doubled in a century (4.8 million in 1910 to 8.8 million in 2020); while bright young things move to New York in droves, they are outnumbered by New Yorkers with established norms of behavior, so they adapt. But Cairo is expanding so quickly that there is always a critical mass of people who 1) are so new they genuinely have no idea what is going on, or 2) don’t bother to assimilate, because the city is changing all the time anyway.

These people come to Cairo because it’s an economic hub. Relatively, at least. Egypt’s economy is growing, but calling it a middle income country would be generous. This brings me to part 2 in my Cairo chaos theory: Egyptians have to hustle to survive, which makes their daily lives (and in turn, their behavior) harder to predict.

On one end of the spectrum, you have honest people juggling multiple gigs, because single jobs don’t generate enough income. I know an engineer/diving instructor, an embassy worker/car washer, and a private tutor/driver/building manager/Mormon church teacher. These types are always rushing somewhere, and often show up late, forget something, or go MIA—not out of malice or incompetence, but out of stress and exhaustion. Aggressive panhandlers and straight-up scammers are the other extreme, and they may be the people you least expect. I have lost count of the number of times a random person has struck up a friendly conversation with me, then offered to take me “to special Egyptian bazaar, only open today” and told me I had to buy something because their cousin is getting married tomorrow (?). A friend once had a police officer beg him for money, claiming the government didn’t pay enough.

Following on the theme of the developing economy: Cairo’s infrastructure is often crumbling or nonexistent. This is the third chaotic element.

Though the government is pouring money into infrastructure projects, many of Cairo’s “modern” roads and public buildings date to the Nasser era, i.e. 50-65 years ago. They are usually poorly maintained. In the meantime, unplanned settlements have sprung up (again, rapid population growth) and roads have to be built around them. It’s not uncommon for the road you are driving on to just sort of…end, and suddenly you’re rolling over dry dirt wondering which way to go. I have seen fewer than 10 traffic lights in my time here and can’t recall any crosswalks. Streets curve and wind aimlessly and often do not have names. Nor do buildings always have addresses, making it hard to find places you haven’t been to before. Sometimes the place you are going does have an address, but another building has the same one. My home address shows up in two places on Google maps, so delivery drivers often try to drop my orders a mile away.

None of these circumstances—mass of humanity, economic hardship, poor city planning—is unique to Cairo. But when you combine them, the result is a special brand of absurdity. This lack of order can be difficult for Westerners to accept. But if you want to thrive here, you have to learn to embrace it. My life got far easier when I stopped looking for logic where there isn’t any, and simply started dodging obstacles as they came.

I have found that to be a gift. It keeps me focused on what’s in front of me and has taught me to worry less about the things I can’t control. Uncertainty is everywhere. All I can do is say inshallah—if God wills it—and hope for the best. And besides, in chaos there is opportunity. You can find anything in Cairo if you know where to look. You want custom scuba gear made for your parakeet? There’s a guy for that. It’s just a matter of asking around until you find him—a painful exercise, but one that builds connections that can help you navigate Bedlam.

You can even find quietude if you know where to look for it. It could be in the gentle hum of the call to prayer that drowns out the ceaseless honking. It could be in a glass of a cold, sweet lemon juice with mint, which revives you in the desert heat. Or you might find it floating down the Nile on a felucca, watching the sun set orange on one side of the river while the moon rises over the other.

Cairo may be a mess, but it’s a beautiful one.