By Mohamed Gaber

Translated by:Aisha El-Awady

“We can’t sleep or rest and every other day our kids are at the doctor. We put the house up for sale years ago but we can’t sell it. We can’t stand our lives, but this is our destiny, what can we do about it?” said Um Rajab, while sitting on an elevated stone in front of her house, describing the misery her and her family of eight have been living in.

Um Rajab is a resident of Al-Wabour village, which is located in Itsa municipality in Al-Fayoum governorate. The horrible smell, revolting view and insects that have spread everywhere as a result of the collections of sewage water that have surrounded all corners of her house, have made her life miserable.

Since her house has now become worthless after becoming surrounded by sewage water, she can neither sell it, nor leave it, and at the same time, living there has become practically impossible.

But this crisis is not affecting Um Rajab and her family alone, in fact, it is affecting one third of those living in Al-Wabour, which has a population of 12,000. And despite the complaints they have made to the local unit and municipal officials, their dilemma continues.

At the outskirts of the village we saw a front row of clean homes, but as soon as you pass that front row you see and smell the filthy sewage water that has flooded most of the homes in the village. Even worse is the shocking site of many children playing in the middle of this polluted environment, putting them at risk of nasty diseases in the near future.

“We’ve been suffering from this problem for 5 whole years now and no one in the government cares. Instead, we have to remove the sewage water ourselves which costs L.E 100 daily, an amount we cannot afford,” said Mahmoud Abd Al-Lateef, one of the village residents.

“We have had to move to the upper floors of our houses since the sewage water has caused serious cracks in the walls of the ground floors.”

He went on to say, “Our children keep getting sick and we don’t know what to do. The real estate taxes have only made things worse; how can we pay real estate tax when we are flooded with sewage water?!”

Mohammad Abd Al-Alim, a teacher who works at the village’s industrial high school, said, “The situation has gotten worse the past few years and this is mainly due to the absence of a sewage removal system for the village.”

“The septic tanks in the higher homes overflow into the houses, and the residents are unable to empty the septic tanks because of the distance of the sewage disposal area and the high cost,” said Abd Al-Alim.

After trying everything else, the residents sent a complaint to Dr. Hatem El-Gabaly, the Minister of Health and Population, who sent a fact-finding committee that came to verify the complaint.

Things, however, remained unchanged, which is liable to result in a serious health crisis as the increased salinity of the soil will likely lead to the erosion of the drinking water pipes, which would result in the drinking water becoming mixed with the sewage water.

Saber Salama, an engineer from the fact-finding committee said, “The village is experiencing a tragedy and there has been negligence on the part of all of the officials beginning from the governor and all the way up to the municipal officials who have avoided meeting with us.”

“When we called the head of the Itsa local council, Jalal Murad, he said he didn’t have any instructions from the governor and then he hung up on me,” he complained.

Dr. Mohamed Tharwat, the Director of endemic diseases in Al-Fayoum Directorate of Health, said, “We inspected Al-Wabour village and found it drowning in sewage, so we sprayed disinfectant on the ponds and wetlands. This measure does not solve the problem; we can only solve it if we have the cooperation of the local officials who refuse to meet us.”

So who will save the thousands of residents of this village and others like it across Egypt from the misery found not only in their villages, but inside their very own homes? Is there a solution in site?