Traffic Jam

When I first got to Cairo it seemed to me that the traffic here was mad. There are no traffic signals, no signaling during traffic, no stop signs, no lanes, no headlights at night, no pedestrian crossings. For the first few weeks I flinched everytime I took a cab ride. However, since then being almost killed in traffic everyday has become as common as the guys across the street with the machine guns.

The other day however I was jolted back to reality a bit. Often we will see car wrecks but never any real carnage. On the way home from work we were caught in a traffic jam on the highway. During our wait my freind, the driver, said, "Some one better be dead if I have to wait this long." Wish granted. Here in Cairo people will run across four lanes of highway traffice to jump a median and go through four more lanes of traffic. Assuming you do this all the time, eventually fate will catch you. Its not just men who do it, but children, women, and the ederly. The day before this the car in front of our bus was going about fifty miles and hour and tore it's mirror off by clipping an old lady crossing the highway. We were all stunned that she wasn't flattened. This day however our subject was not as lucky. As we rolled slowly by we saw first a group of people at the median in a circle. In the middle was a man in a galabaya wailing. A small distance down the road was a corpse covered in newspaper, a small corpse. This however did not slag our thirst. Where was the car that hit that person? A short while later we happend upon a military van with the front end compacted and all the windows blown out. The vechile must not have slowed down at all because there were no skid marks.

I can truthfully say that unless I find myself at gunpoint someday my rides to and from work every morning are probably the most dangerous times of my life.