The hard sell. You’re a captive audience. You can’t leave, you can’t look away. It’s kind of like that used car salesman pitch or that great vacation to Boca, but you have to attend a presentation on timeshares to get it.
Only this time we are in Egypt and they are selling carpets. Now, Fran and I know we don’t want to buy a carpet. Fran doesn’t even own a floor, for god’s sake. But, we want to make DeDe, our guide, happy. So, off we go to the “carpet school”, where we are going to get a short presentation on how carpets are made and then an “opportunity” to buy a genuine, fully knotted, silk or wool, carpet/wall hanging. The excitement in the car was palatable. Carpet shopping is not why I came to Cairo.
We pull up in front of a beautiful, large building. It is the color of the desert, with Egyptian statues and art decorating the façade. Again, I remind you we ain’t here to buy. DeDe reminds us of the game plan and promises to see us when the shopping has concluded. So, Fran and I reluctantly head up the stairs. This is not going to be easy. Neither one of us are good with the hard sell. Fran and I are both people pleasers. We just want to make you happy. That makes us happy. You being happy. Basically, we are sitting ducks.
Inside it is kind of dark. There are 4 giant looms suspended from the ceiling, 2 on either side, with 2 or 3 people sitting in front of them. They are bent over their work and don’t really notice us coming in. We are quickly met at the door by Ali, let’s call him, and he gives us a fevered pitch about how one should only buy a rug that has been hand knotted. How do you know something is hand knotted, he begs us to ask? He leads us over to the first loom. A demonstration is in order! Tiny fingers grasp the strings that will hold the silk thread and they show us how the knot is tied. The tiny fingers are attached to a beautiful smiling girl, about 14. She is thrilled to show us how she spends her days...bent over a loom demonstrating knotting techniques, for rich tourists. All three of the girls seem to smile on command. They work so fast. They sit on slightly padded planks of wood. My ass hurt just looking at it.
As Ali led us around to each loom, to see the difference between silk thread and wool, the girls continued to get younger and younger. Just as my temper was starting to boil, we stopped in front of an older man working on a hideous wall hanging. It was in wool and it was your basic “could have been in velvet” design. Camels, pyramids...no jaguar... which was a tad disappointing.
As we were being quickly lead to the showroom I asked, in my best politically correct, please don’t stone the woman voice, “I noticed that the man working downstairs was considerable older than the rest of your workers, is there a reason for that?” I was told that the man had true artistic skills and was actually designing as he went, rather than follow a pattern which is what the others were doing. That was as much as I could get out. For soon we were up the stairs to receive our Fanta’s and to have carpets unrolled at our feet. We oo-ed and ah-ed for awhile. Fran actually considered buying something so that we could escape and be seen by our mothers again. I just couldn’t let that happen! What was she going to do with a wall hanging of Nefertiti? So, I let Ali know that we just couldn’t afford anything and that we were ready for our guide to show us out. That was hard, since the Fanta had been poured and now we felt like we owed him something. He smiled with his bad teeth and let us know it was no problem. Suddenly, DeDe was there, like she had been there all the time and we just didn’t see her.
As we headed back to the car, I ran back inside to get a candid shot of the girls. This time, no one was really working, they looked like they were on their “coffee break” and we just waiting for the next bus of eager carpet buyers to arrive. They seemed surprise that I wanted to take a picture of them. I could almost see the cigarettes dangling from their mouths.
Ok, so I was dying to ask DeDe questions about the use of children in factories. I imagined the girls, the welt marks on their backs and the amount of markup those carpets had when those girls were probably being paid change and having to support their 7 brothers and sisters and their drunken fathers who had never worked a day in their lives, although their mother took in washing which was never truly clean, since they insisted on drying the sheets outside in the polluted air and how they would be married soon to some old dried up man who bought them from the family as soon as they could bear children.
As soon as the car door slammed, my mouth formed snarky words. I really wanted DeDe to be embarrassed for her country and to stand up and defend it. Fran had to practically kick me under the table to tell me no. It was killing me, but I stifled my words. Steam was coming from my ears and I was practically hopping up and down, but I didn’t say anything. How could I expect DeDe to change the shape of things there? The city had a population of 11 million. 3 million of them lived in the cemetery…the Dead City. They lived in mausoleums. Huge families lived in the family plots. There was no help for the poor. There was no help for the unemployed. There was poverty and filth there that made me cry to look at it.
Looking back, Fran and I talked about how we in America sometimes work as young as 13. We asked questions about the picture I took. Was this just a ploy to get more money from the tourists? The girls smiled on cue, they looked so happy and well taken care of…maybe, they were family and this was just part of the shtick.
Were we just trying to excuse away the awful reality?
How can one person do something to help these people? We talked a lot about personal responsibility and the duty you have to fix what you see as injustices around you. Such huge problems how do you/can you help? Cairo is an amazing city of colossal beauty, heartbreaking poverty and persevering people. It was a trip that will continue to shape my feelings of being part of a larger picture for the rest of my life.
