Arguing with the Irrational

So much of life in Egypt is spent dealing with unreasonable situations, illogical rules and irrational people, that I can forget the good things about life here. Most Egyptian people are amazingly kind and generous. The weather’s great. Strangers will help you carry bags that are too heavy. I like the food. If you’re lost while driving, other drivers routinely go out of their way to lead you to the destination. Everyone always says hello, asks how you are, and seems to mean it when they are concerned. But then there are situations like the following two. . .

[Note: if you don’t want to read my bitching, just look at the photos – they have nothing to do with the stories herein.]

Exhibit A: The Landlady.

Our new apartment is lovely; the landlady not so much. I won’t enumerate all the evidence of her insanity, especially since I wasn’t around for the bulk of it when my roommates first moved in. The main point begins with this problem: she has yet to collect any money from us (this now amounts to three months’ rent and the deposit) and yet calls constantly, sometimes more than five times a day about other small repairs she wants to make around the apartment – repairs we don’t even care about, like the cabinet in the kitchen that doesn’t quite close. The Landlady was once again supposed to come collect the rent this morning and, once again, she canceled. That is the fourth time she’s done this. (She also raised the rent by LE 500 on my roommates after they had already moved in when she discovered that their third roommate was not going to sleep on the couch for a semester, or share a bedroom.) At least this time she called to say she couldn’t come; on other occasions she simply never came and never mentioned it.

I should interject that, when something is broken, she is very responsive and diligent about fixing it. That is a good feature no doubt, but for some reason she does not just send repair men over. Instead, she comes and stands there with them for hours, completely disrupting our day, and if we don’t entertain her she acts put out. She invites the doorman’s children into our house, making them think it is okay to ring our bell at all hours and ask for gifts. It isn’t okay.

Anyway, the point to which I am getting is this: we haven’t signed a contract, we haven’t paid and therefore we are basically under her control. And so we now have to find a new housecleaner.

Our old housecleaner was a very kind Sudanese man. He was a student at STAR, although not in my class, and came recommended as a cleaner and as a person by a fellow STAR teacher. He cleaned our previous apartment multiple times without problem.

When we said we did not want to use The Landlady’s maid (who did an atrocious job and also had a very unfortunate body odor) again and mentioned our own cleaner, The Landlady flipped out. The reason? Sudanese people are all thieves, she assured us. She had two Sudanese maids before and they stole all the forks from her kitchen.

We argued this topic with The Landlady for over a month as the apartment got progressively dustier (Yes, we could just clean ourselves, but we would not do as good a job and, well, we don’t want to. The dust here is not like any I have ever experienced – in fact, at the moment we are in the middle of the annual two-month long sand storms that plague Cairo. Dust breeds like radioactive – and dirty – bunnies). We protested that, although Sudanese, the cleaner is a good person and has never stolen from us. We pointed out that we trust him with far more tempting items for theft, like iPods and laptops and plain old money, that we would always be home when he was cleaning, that god forbid anything be stolen we would be completely responsible and replace it.

She was not persuaded. Finally she agreed to meet him and see whether he was an acceptable cleaner to come into her house. I think she considered meeting him to be a great concession. So she came into the apartment, marched over to him and basically opened with “Listen, I don’t know you and Sudanese people steal. How do I know you won’t steal from me?” She insisted that he swear on the Qur’an that he wouldn’t take anything, or else she would be compelled to remove everything from the kitchen, i.e. the forks, spoons, cups, pots and so on. The Landlady contends that our renting of her furnished flat includes only large furniture and appliances and that she has left us pots and pans only out of the goodness of her heart.

I think that she is correct, except for the whole goodness of her heart thing. When the cleaner refused to swear on the Qur’an, she demanded a photocopy of his passport to take to the police. He is a refugee and thus cannot legally work in Cairo. This would be a big problem.

Long story short, Number 6 and I defended the cleaner to The Landlady for an hour and a half but she did not bend. She repeated that we are like her “own daughters” and that she trusts us, but this apparently does not extend to trusting our judgment when it comes to house cleaners. He didn’t help himself by calling her on her disrespect for him (when he himself was accused of disrespect), by refusing to swear on the Qur’an, and by acting like an intelligent individual with pride. I’m not saying that he should have toadied to her, that he should have (for lack of an Egyptian cultural term for this) played the Uncle Tom, but it would have saved him a job. Since we basically had to choose between losing a housecleaner or having a kitchen without any dishes, pots or pans, we chose the pans.

Exhibit B: The Next Door Neighbor

The Next Door Neighbor is a very strange individual. I had met him only once before last night, but I hear that he offered Number 6 to come live in his house for free, which is a bit beyond creepy. He also apparently has a massive rivalry with The Landlady (he is married to her sister or something) and they don’t speak. When Number 6 and I called on him to ask a question about the dog (another diatribe could be written about the dog situation but I’ll skip it), he insisted that we drink some soda. We politely declined, at which point he shoved the cans in our hands. We just held them. I was planning to give it away later. Number 6 managed to do that. But Next Door Neighbor was displeased with my not drinking his proffered drink so he marched over to me, opened the can, stuck a straw inside and then attempted to forcibly insert the straw into my mouth.

Needless to say, I was not pleased with this development. I ducked and did not laugh, saying something like “Stop it,” whereupon he got defensive and said it was just a joke, why was I mad?

The next time I saw him he said “You are still mad with me?” and I joked (kind of) along with a “yes.”

The thing is, Next Door Neighbor has been doing some sort of remodeling on his apartment. For weeks now my entire day has been punctuated by loud banging from the other side of the wall, hammering and who knows what all else that goes on for hours, often until 9 pm. It is very difficult to concentrate in this situation, or even to relax. We never complained to him because we kept hoping it would just stop, that he would finish whatever he was doing and we could forget all about it.

Last night at 10.30, the banging was still going on. So I put a sweatshirt over my pajamas and rang his doorbell. I was planning to be very polite, but he started out on the defensive. “Half an hour more” he told me, and when I started to ask how much longer (as in days/weeks/months) the noise would go on, he yelled “When you needed help with the dog, I helped you!” Then he repeated that the noise would end in half an hour. I got a bit pissed and gave him an excellent comeback: “Fine!” As I was headed back to our door, he slammed his so loudly that Number 6 heard it from her room.

To his credit, the hammering did stop in half an hour, but judging from the amount of building supplies next to his door this morning, I don’t anticipate peace and quiet any time soon:

Is it wrong to ask my neighbor to cease the racket in the middle of the nighttime? Is it outside of our rights to bring a housecleaner into a rented flat without our landlady’s approval? I don’t know quite how to deal with people like this, situations like this, problems like this. There is no solution, and I think that is what drives me the most crazy. I like to fix problems, not just let them fester.

But fester they do, and it stinks.