My Personal Project

My personal project has been on a very unique subject which is about "Actual Life in Cemeteries in Egypt." It is a very important issue that has never been discussed before. I have chosen this topic because I felt that I wanted to shed some light on this subject. I have written a long essay in French about this topic. Egypt is the only country in the world in which we find poor people living in cemeteries.

Poverty is a great problem in Egypt. It has been so for many centuries. For hundreds and hundreds of years, Egypt has suffered from this problem. There are many poor people living in Egypt. A great number of them are homeless and penniless, they don't have a place to live in nor money to survive and so they take the cemeteries to be their only home and after settling down there, they go on begging in the streets asking money from those who come to pay a visit to their dead relatives and dear ones.

 I find this topic a very important one to tackle as it has never been tackled before by any student. I have gathered a lot of information and ideas about this topic, I even paid around five visits to our family's cemeteries and I met with the guards of the cemeteries who are living a normal life there. Each time I did a different interview with them, I asked them many questions about the way they lead their lives, how they earn money, how they are able to survive in such poor areas. Funny enough, each time I got different answers to my questions particularly those related to money.

A great number of them lied to me when I asked them about how they earn their money. Some of them pretended that they are trying to get money in an honorable way whereas I have been able to learn in an indirect way through some people that most of them win their money by selling dead bodies to the students of the faculty of medicine who study 'Anatomy' and their only way to get a dead body is through buying a dead body from one of the guards of the cemeteries. In this way, the guards earn a great amount of money. In Egypt, this kind of trade is regarded as an illegal and unmerciful action because it is actually a crime and a theft.

I was lucky enough to offer one of the guards a job to move away from the cemeteries and to take a job as a guard in a big house in a place far away from the cemeteries as one of my cousins needed to have a guard guarding his big house permanently. So I felt I needed to do some kind of favor to anyone of them and I was happy when he gladly accepted my offer and thanked me a lot for my help.    

I have learned and acquired many skills, information, and ideas from my project.  I have managed to learn about many things which I have never known before in my life. It was a remarkable and an unforgettable experience to me.