By Menna A. Farouk
CAIRO, May 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – It is a Friday morning in Egypt’s City of the Dead, the day of the week when families usually visit cemeteries to remember their deceased loved ones.
But these days there are barely any visitors in the vast Cairo cemetery, which stretches over four miles and where tens of thousands of people have been living and working among the tombs for decades.
Fearful of catching the novel coronavirus, many Egyptians are staying away from public places like cemeteries, cutting off an essential source of income for the workers who rely on donations from the families of the dead to make a living.
“Life is rapidly changing here in the cemeteries,” said Am Ahmed, a 60-year-old gravedigger who has been living in the City of the Dead – known in Egypt as el-Qarafa – for more than 30 years.
He still gets paid for the job of burying the dead, but that income alone is not enough to support his family, he said.
“We used to get money and food from people who visit the cemeteries. But now as everyone is afraid there are almost no visits,” Ahmed lamented.
Informal workers across the globe are highly vulnerable to the economic impact of the novel coronavirus outbreak, as people stay home either by choice or by government decree, say labour rights groups like the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF).
About 40% of Egypt’s total workforce of 30 million people works in the informal sector, according to Egypt’s manpower ministry, but groups such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) say the number is closer to 60%.
Gebali el-Maraghi, head of the ETUF, a state-affiliated independent organisation, says two-thirds of Egypt’s informal workers have already lost their jobs due to the policies and public fear around the virus.
“Cafes, restaurants, barbershops, beauty salons, among others, are now closed … taking a toll on their workers,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.
Living in inadequate housing, with limited access to healthcare and no alternative source of income, Ahmed said he and other cemetery workers risk falling deeper into poverty the longer people stay away.
“It has greatly affected our monthly pay,” he said. “Our lives are getting even harder.”
SILENT, CAUTIOUS
Built only as a burial site in the 7th century, the City of the Dead has transformed into one of the country’s largest slums, home to more than 1.5 million people, according to official figures from 2017 – the latest available.
The families who work in the cemetery digging graves, burying bodies and maintaining the tombs and mausoleums say they have seen a steep drop in their incomes since the Egyptian government announced a partial lockdown on March 21.
To try to slow the spread of COVID-19, which has infected more than 7,500 Egyptians, according to Johns Hopkins University, the government closed mosques and churches, and implemented a nightly curfew for residents while partially closing cafes, restaurants and shopping malls.
Ibrahim Radwan, 33, a street vendor who sells bread to people visiting the cemeteries at Sayeda Nafisa mosque, a five-minute walk from the City of the Dead, used to get between 15 and 30 customers a day.
Now, he says, he is lucky if he gets four customers over a whole weekend.
“It is really devastating for my business,” Radwan said. “I do not know how I will be able to feed my children.”
Some 1.6 billion informal workers around the world, representing nearly half of the global labour force, are in immediate danger of losing their livelihoods due to the coronavirus pandemic, the ILO said last week.
To help Egypt’s informal workers get through the pandemic, the government announced in March that it would give each worker a monthly grant of 500 Egyptian pounds ($32) for three months, which critics say is not enough for a family to live on.
