A bawaab’s holiday

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  Women and men line up to buy bread at a bakery. Amira, the wife of Salama, leaves her village house shortly after dawn everyday to buy bread at the shop.

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  Salama, left, eats breakfast with Hagag Mohammed, a fellow bawaab, in the foyer to the apartment building where he works in Cairo. The pair are part of tens of thousands of migrant workers across Cairo who function as doormen, car parkers, errand runners, night watchmen, gardeners and just about anything.

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  Sayed Ahmed Abdoh checks his fish traps in the Nile, near Abu Al Nasr village. Abdoh caught about 20 fish this day and gave them to his friend, Salama, to celebrate his return to their village.

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  Salama waits for water to be boiled to make tea before going to bed. He has two holidays a year.

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  Salama leads his buffalo to a field to feed as his son Hamdy, 13, looks on.

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  Salama plays with his children Sameh, 5, left, and Zainab, 10.

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  Back to the grind. Salama rides a train back to Cairo.

ABU AL NASR, Egypt // Salama Osman’s day begins before the tenants of his Cairo apartment building wake and ends only after the last returns home at night, a work week without weekends. Except this week.

Mr Osman, 46, is on one of his two trips a year back home to the village of Abu Al Nasr, about 770 kilometres south of Cairo. Here, he can relax with his family, a rare respite from his hectic job back in the always-bustling Egyptian capital.

Mr Osman is a “bawaab”, one of tens of thousands of migrant workers across Cairo who function as doormen, car parkers, errand runners, night watchmen, gardeners and just about anything.

During Egypt’s 2011 revolt and the subsequent chaos surrounding the 2013 military removal of the country’s president, they also armed themselves with clubs and knives, forming impromptu neighbourhood watches.

As a bawaab, Osman earns a monthly base salary of 600 Egyptian pounds (Dh289). That may not seem like a lot, but goes a long way in Abu Al Nasr, one of many small villages along the Nile in southern Egypt.

“There are no jobs,” Mr Osman says of his village, where most live off farming. “There is not much money in [harvesting] sugar cane.”

The village, just south of the Temple of Horus and a small step pyramid, is where Mr Osman grew up. His wife, Amira, and his four children all live here, just next to a 260 square metre plot where they grow vegetables and keep a water buffalo and chickens.

It is a peaceful existence, far from the noisy and cramped life Mr Osman lives in Cairo. He still works though, handling household tasks. At night, he has a quiet moment for himself, watching Egyptian classic movies, professional wrestling and Indian movies on television while sipping a cup of tea. On Sham Al Nessim, an Egyptian holiday, he takes his children to the Nile to have lunch on its banks.

“Everything was perfect,” he says on the 12-hour train journey back to Cairo.

Back in Cairo, Mr Osman settles quickly into his routine. He occasionally pauses long enough to have a cup of tea in front of the apartment building where he works.

He has worked as a doorman for 16 years in and around the Cairo. He speaks every day by phone to his wife and children, but the money he makes in Cairo can support all of them, forcing him to continue his life in the big city.

He cannot say how many more years he will work before returning to live with his family.

“Maybe five years. Maybe 10,” he says. “Not yet.”

* Associated Press