The Road to Wady El-Mullak: Eighteen children died in the dust. Then the politicians arrived
Death arrived from the start in a way that was hard to ignore.
I was still on the road from El-Salam Station to Bilbeis, from where I’d move on to the village of Abu Ezbawy in Wady El-Mullak: birthplace of 12 of the young men among the 18 victims of the Ismailiya accident, most of them not yet twenty, killed on their way home from day-labor work on the Amal Farm in Ismailiya.
I’d searched the village’s name before setting off. The name rang familiar when a colleague mentioned it as I was leaving Al Manassa’s office. In the search results, Abu Ezbawy came up because its sons get cancer.
In 2012, Al-Dostor published a report on roughly 200 of its residents falling sick with the disease, which pushed the Ministry of Health at the time to carry out an environmental survey to understand the causes. We know nothing about the survey’s results. Three years later, though, Youm7 published a report headlined “Sharqiya’s Abu Ezbawy Village: Cancer Exists Like Water and Air: the Disease Has Killed More Than 200 People in a Single Square Kilometer.” I read the report, filed under a series on “cancer villages,” yesterday morning, Wednesday. But when I went back to it that evening, I kept landing on the site’s homepage instead. Nothing was left of the report but its headline on the series page, and a broken link.
A little later, the smell of death thickened, grew heavier, when a car that had been in an accident appeared in the middle of the road, ringed by three police cars and an ambulance.
Even the driver’s choice of route seemed to lead toward the same feeling. Instead of cutting through Bilbeis, he took the regional road, the same one that saw a similar accident last summer near Ashmoun in Menoufiya, where 18 girls were killed and three others injured on their way to day-labor work at a grape farm.
Then we reached Bilbeis. From there, I got on another microbus to Wady El-Mullak. On the road, I saw young men packed inside a pickup truck, more than 15 of them, some clinging to the truck bed, others sitting on top of it. I hoped I wouldn’t witness a new accident.
I got off at El-Full (Arabian Jasmine) Bridge, before the village of El-Abbasa El-Sughra. The pedestrian bridge looked ready to collapse: rebar piercing through concrete eaten away by time, its foundations rattling with every car that passed on the road beneath it. I crossed it and found myself at the edge of Wady El-Mullak.
“The Minister is coming”
From Kubri El-Full, the Wady El-Mullak road begins, linking Sharqiya and Ismailiya governorates, stretching some 9 kilometers through several villages, including the four where the victims’ families live: Ezbet El-Shalah, Abu Agwa, El-Dawoudiyya, and Abu Ezbawy. From here, transportation becomes a test of endurance. No microbuses, no buses. Only open-bed pickup trucks carrying people to the villages.
Sheep and livestock greeted me at the start of the road. I waited more than half an hour for a truck, in heat pushing close to forty degrees. When it arrived, the women pushed to climb aboard. One of them nearly fell with her infant when the driver pulled off suddenly as she was still boarding. Other women caught both of them just in time. I chose instead to take the “taftaf,” as people there call the tuktuk.
On this road I noticed traces of yellow soil, and saw a loader, vehicles from the Abu Hammad district and city local council, and water-spraying trucks passing to pack it down and patch some of the road’s defects—defects I could feel clearly from inside the taftaf: continuous jolting from potholes, cracks, and ridges on both sides.
The driver couldn’t get past 15 kilometers an hour, and he couldn’t hold back his anger either, talking about how the road only gets smoothed and cared for because “the officials” are coming—the way it goes in Ibrahim Al-Shaqanqiri’s film “The Minister Is Coming,” all the way back in 1986 dramatizing this endemic, chronic failure of safety regulations.
To enter any village from the main road, you have to cross a slumping palm trunk laid over the canal, or a narrow concrete or wooden post wide enough for one person only, crossed with great care to avoid falling into the water. Only Ezbet El-Dawoudiyya has a wooden bridge wide enough for two people; but it too is falling apart, as if its age no longer lets it carry any more weight.
After passing the victims’ homes in the four villages, three of which people can only reach by crossing the waterlogged palm trunks, I told the driver I wanted to go to the funeral tent in Abu Ezbawy. As soon as I got off the taftaf there, I found a number of formwork carpenters working over the canal, building a new bridge. Wooden planks, nails, restless movement. The work was nearly finished, the driver laughed and said, “What’d I tell you? The officials!”
I continued to the mourning tent, which looked nothing like the road leading to it: a vast, elaborate marquee, its awning spread across a large plot of land the village had turned into a football pitch. There, I learned from residents that the governorate was the one that had paid for the tent to be set up this way, fit for officials. After it had also paid for repairing the road and building the bridge to bring them to the gathering just as fittingly.
Death opens doors for questions
At the tent’s entrance stood some of the villages’ notables and more than one omda—village mayor. Inside the marquee, grieving faces. The victims’ families, though, were in their own homes, receiving comforters. I decided to go to their homes instead. When I stepped out, I found the wooden bridge nearly finished, even covered now with the mourning tent’s awning.
I set off with a young man from the village who had worked, like the young men who died in the accident, for the contractor known as “Amm Sayed,” who transports village workers to job sites—including the Amal Farm in Ismailiya—in five pickup trucks. They leave the village after dawn, keep working until noon, get a two-hour break, then go back to work until after the afternoon prayer.
A worker’s daily wage averages between 200 and 300 Egyptian pounds (around $4–$6), depending on output. Children get a different rate. The work changes with the season: one day in the orange groves, another in the mango orchards. And because pickup trucks are the village’s main mode of transport, riding in one wasn’t anything unusual for them: “We’re used to the trucks, that’s basically our transport in the first place.”
We set out toward the nearest cluster of homes, about a kilometer and a half away, covered on foot, to Ezbet El-Shalah to the funeral of Mohamed El-Sayed Mohamed, a student in his final year of commercial high school and a day laborer on the farms. The men were in the guest room, the women in the house.
In the guest room, I was received by Amm Sayed, a man in his late fifties who commands notable respect from the village, and who had taken on the job of receiving journalists. He asked me, “Wouldn’t you rather record with the martyr’s father? The man’s poor, his back is broken.”
The father works on a farm and hadn’t seen his son Mohamed in a week: “I was there last week, working day labor, whatever job there is. In summer season I work the mango fields for two months, and the rest of the year there’s no work.” Sayed, Mohamed’s father, earns between 200 and 300 pounds a day. “The work’s by output…as much as you work is as much money as you take.” The Sayed family’s situation grew worse after he was cut from the Takaful and Karama welfare program. “There’s no support from the state at all.” Some time ago a car hit him, and his foot injury is still visible; he believes “the state has forgotten us.”
As for Mohamed, who wasn’t yet seventeen, he “would leave at dawn and come back at five in the afternoon, or maybe after sunset, because the work’s by output,” his father says, then adds, “Mohamed was our youngest, but he was the apple of my eyes, he was the closest to me. He used to tell me, you’re tired, Baba, just wait and see, I won’t let you work anymore, I’ll be the one supporting you and Mama.”
The father cries, then says, “I failed him.” He breaks down in tears. Mohamed’s older brother’s voice cuts in: “We’ve left him in God’s care, don’t film, don’t take pictures.” Around us, a number of the young men start talking, as if Mohamed’s death had opened a door on complaints held back for years.
“People can’t find anything, what are they supposed to do? Die, is that it? There’s people who can’t make it, people on the edge, it’s not just hard anymore, people are barely getting by. God have mercy.” “Not all the treasures in the world make up for a child.”
“Let the Egypt-people at the coast parties, the ones whose tickets cost a full year’s wages, come look instead of lecturing us about why the kids work. Look at Egypt! Look at the real people of this country! There’s no work except the factories in 10th of Ramadan, and those don’t take anyone under 18 except for day work in packing or on the farms. We’re people who make do with what we have, all we’ve got is our health and our bodies, and we sell them to survive…but I swear to God, we die a thousand times over.”
One of the young men complains that water has become a daily problem: “We can’t find water to drink. The water smells like sewage and it cuts off once or twice a day, my mother’s sick, she’s on dialysis, and the weather’s brutal. Power cuts out for two hours in the afternoon, right in the worst heat.”
Another adds that the villages of Wady El-Mullak have no sewage system and no hospitals, explaining that the nearest hospital is Abu Hammad Hospital, reached by the same road I’d just come down. “The road’s bad. They only fixed it with gravel and sand and watering since yesterday.” Then he pulls out his phone. “Want me to show you what the road really looks like?” He plays a video, scrolls through photos, of an unlit road running alongside the canal, its edge looking ready to give way. Then he asks the question that needs no answer: “Does everyone here have to die before someone looks our way?”
Egypt of the Hamlet…
Abu Agwa village lost two brothers in the accident: the older, Karim El-Sisi, a man in his twenties, recently married and father to a three-month-old daughter, and the younger, Ibrahim, who had been preparing to marry. Their mother still doesn’t know Ibrahim is dead. Since she heard the news of Karim’s death, she has fainted every time she wakes, according to family members who fear that telling her would be more than she could bear. “We don’t know what would happen to her if we told her Ibrahim died too.”
The family refused to hold its mourning in the collective tent in Abu Ezbawy. The day before, the head of the city council had come to the home of Ahmed, Karim and Ibrahim’s uncle, but the family insisted on staying in its own village. “This is the only funeral service. Where was the governorate before people died?” one relative commented. “We’re not going to stand in line so an MP or a governor can receive condolences that should be ours.”
Holding the mourning gatherings isn’t a financial burden on the village, which has a tradition known as the “cash pool of the dead.” Every married man and every waged young man pays 100 pounds with each death, to cover the necessary costs. The event hall, too, sits on the second floor of the village mosque, so, “there’s no cost,” according to the same relative.
Outside the funeral, another list of daily burdens stretches on. Job opportunities are limited, the road is hard, water and power cuts recur, gas cylinders are delayed, and there’s no hospital, no equipped health unit. To buy even the simplest necessities, residents have to go to Abu Hammad. “If you don’t have a motorbike, you won’t manage to run your errands,” the relative explains, because the taftaf costs at least 120 pounds each way, while packing into the open pickup truck stays the cheapest option; 25 pounds each way.
El-Sisi’s relative ties the rising cost of transport to the rise in gasoline and diesel prices, while reaching basic services, for the people of Abu Agwa, remains a journey that never ends at the village’s edge.
In El-Dawoudiyya, where the village lost seven of its sons, women sat in front of the houses, dressed in black, watching passersby with suspicion. I headed to the home of Mohamed Khaled, a recently married young man whose wife, according to a neighbor, was seven months pregnant. But before I reached the house, one of his relatives stopped me and warned me off. “Don’t go!” she said. “They’ll throw you out. They’re already chasing off journalists. Do you people want to violate our lives? Our grief isn’t a spectacle.”
Her anger at the previous day’s coverage was clear: “Yesterday people were grieving their children, and journalists were filming, and people were beating their chests and tearing at their clothes in agony, and these people were filming it. What do you want from us? All this for reach and likes? Would you do the same for your mother’s death? your sister?!”
I settled for offering condolences to the family and left. I walked back on foot to the collective mourning tent, a distance of about two kilometers, along dirt streets lined with two-story red-brick houses, threaded through with gardens and farmland.
…and Egypt of the Palace
When I got back, MP Ahmed Fouad Abaza had arrived in his BMW X6, followed by MP Suleiman Wahdan in a ROX 01 four-wheel drive, then MP Medhat El-Sengary in a Jeep, an older model than his two colleagues’ cars, both more senior to him in parliament.
One of the residents sitting next to me summed up what he saw as the reason the village’s suffering keeps going, in the absence of any real attention from the state and its MPs. “If the state and the MPs cared about us, the water situation in the village would be better.” Same with the roads, where no one had responded to repeated complaints about their condition. “We went and complained to so-and-so, he told us, I got where to my position in office on my own dime.”
The promises residents had heard kept repeating, by his account, without anything changing on the ground. “They all promised us they’d fix and pave the road, and nothing happened.”
A large number of journalists were waiting for the MPs. Cameras, flashes, and a welcome from the villages’ mayors and some young men. In the crowd, one of the female MPs asked after the “omda”, and three people answered at once: “I’m the omda.” Someone from the village quickly stepped in to explain that they were mayors of other villages, then walked her off to find the village’s actual omda.
Next to me sat a delegation from the Ministry of Religious Endowments, about ten clerics, one of whom kept filming them for close to five minutes from different angles. After that, dozens of turbaned men filed in, wearing white and colored galabiyas without cloaks, the heat’s marks plain on their faces and clothes. Some arrived on motorbikes, gathered outside the tent, then entered all together, at once.
I stepped out for a smoke, watching the scene from outside. A government motorcade appeared, six cars, led by a motorbike clearing the way, its rider shouting and waving his arms, stopping pedestrians to make room. Not long after, another motorcade appeared, three cars, also led by a motorbike, but this one didn’t close the road to pedestrians. One resident even kept riding his own motorbike alongside it, as if nothing were unusual.
One motorcade belonged to the governor of Sharqiya, the other to the governor of Ismailiya, but I couldn’t tell which was which; the cars looked alike, and even residents got them mixed up. MPs and journalists lined up to receive the two governors, and about a quarter of an hour later, food arrived at the crowded tent.
I left the tent and decided to head back to Cairo. I waited more than half an hour until a taftaf showed up and took me back to Al-Full Bridge, night having fallen, darkness settling in. Apart from the light from the mourning tent, and some residents’ efforts to light the road because of the occasion, there wasn’t a single lamp lighting the road stretching between the villages.
The mourning ended, the outsiders left, and the road stayed as it was: dirt, dark along its length, running between villages whose people will continue to cross trembling palm trunks to get to work, or to their deaths.