July 3rd
Today was one of my longest days of work yet. It started off at 7:30, when I caught a bus out to Sadat City. Sadat City is where one of the two farms that the DDC owns is located. It is about midway in-between Cairo and Alexandria, still in the Nile Delta but on the border of the desert. I was heading out here to check out the condition of the photovoltaic cells to see if the DDC could use them in the future in developing communities. This looked highly unlikely due to the state of these cells. They were all past the warranty of 20 years, and had just been left to deteriorate for the last decade. The batteries were missing and the DC/AC inverter was broken. I think these things are unusable. However, the trip was not a lose, because I did get to talk to a soil scientist who knew all about the crop water requirements. So I spent a good hour or so interviewing him about how much water was required for agriculture. The information I got from him was invaluable and probably would have taken many hours of research to find the same data.
However, when I was finished with my work at Sadat I had to wait around for a good 2 hours before the bus came to pick me up. I had been told only one hour, but you know how it goes in Egypt. We then took the absolute longest route back to Zamalek, as we dropped the person who lived all the way out in Heliopolis off first which is on the opposite side of the city. So we had to travel around half the ring road to get there. This took us right through the slums of the city and we got to see how most of Cairo lives. Heliopolis on the other end is the newest and nicest part of town. It is where all the rich people are moving and it had some things that absolutely blew our minds, including actual city-planning of streets and businesses and lawns. The lawns were incredible. They must also take a ton of water to maintain as they were really green. I didn’t get back to the apartment until 7:30 in the evening and promptly went to chilis as I was starving and craved American food, because the greatest holiday was coming up tomorrow. I think I will have to try and spend a ton of unnecessary time in a car tomorrow in order to make it three days in a row.
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