During the 2005 Presidential elections, President Hosni Mubarak pledged in his electoral platform to improve access to housing, drinking water and sanitation in the countryside. Two years later, on Feb. 8 2007, the Cairo-based Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) issued a report on the health condition in the country of 80 million. The Jan 8 report uncovered the truth that we all know well: that all the rosy presidential campaign pledges disappeared into thin air. Here's a snippet of what the report revealed: Five million Egyptians died of contaminated water, according to the Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources Mahmoud Abuzeid during a ceremony marking World Water Day; rural areas have no sanitation networks (it's common knowledge that most peasants still answer the call of nature the way their great grandparents did); 26 percent of Egyptians have high blood pressure, 48 percent are diabetics; 17 percent suffer from hepatitis, while 49 percent are infected with bilharzias; and renal failure cases are on the rise. Although health care is a basic human right enshrined in international conventions and in Articles 16 and 17 of the Egyptian constitution, the Egyptian reality on the ground is that the government continuously neglects the health of Egyptians. It has even cut expenditure on the health sector. Reports ranked Egypt first among countries infected with hepatitis and renal failure and Al-Beheira governorate (located about 135 km west of Cairo) leads the way as the worst province hit by the two killer diseases. In Beheira, I met an ill-fated family where the father passed away after both his sons died of renal failure. Samir, the elder son, died in his 30s while the other, Yousef, died in his 40s. I was also told about another tragedy where hepatitis claimed the lives of an entire family. I had a long talk with Hussein who prays that his death won't be slow and painful. During my visit villagers recounted the stories of a host of families who were ravaged by the two killer diseases. I also learnt that villagers had paid for and installed their own sewage system less than a year ago in March 2007, with neither technical nor financial support from the government, when they gave up after lodging tens of complaints which all fell on deaf ears. Of the many villagers I met, Youssef struck me as the proudest of them all. Barely in his 30s, the young villager spearheaded the fund-raising efforts to set up the sewage system. Youssef, who graduated from the Faculty of Commerce at Alexandria University, was starry-eyed as he recounted the story of how they did it. Each of us used to have a sewage pit underneath his home. The sewage was then collected regularly and pumped into the irrigation networks. Afterwards, he continued, "the water-lifting plants pumped the water from the irrigation network into the irrigation canals which are connected to water distillation plants, where it is recycled and made available for drinking. It cost each family LE 63 per month to rent the car to move the sewage, he added. "But the problem was, Yousef said, "that these distillation plants were built to purify irrigation not sanitation water, which means that we literally ended up drink our own urine! The government turns a blind eye to our plight, he said, and every now and then they send us a committee to test the water and, naturally the results are always 100 percent safe. When we were completely fed up with the government, we decided to build our own sanitation network which would cost each resident LE 70. To raise the money some sold a goat, others sold their poultry or their wife's gold earrings. It took four months to build the network and end the nightmare. But the problem still lingers on, said Youssef. "The sewage is still pumped into irrigation canals and we are still drinking it. It would need too much space and cost too much money to set up a full-fledged plant. And as you know, the government has no money for us peasants. I'm sure they're telling each other, 'who cares if they live or die?' Khaled El Khamissi is a political scientist and prolific social commentator who holds a PhD from the Sorbonne University.
