"The Lost Boys of Cairo", Caroline Moorehead

The Prologue to Caroline Moorehead's "Human Cargo" is called "The Lost Boys of Cairo." It documents her interactions with mainly Liberian refugees who are hiding in Cairo. It is a powerful piece of writing, with incredible snapshots of the stories of individuals who have lost everything and whose future is generally bleak:
"Fear, memory, expectations, endlessly deferred, rule in the quicksands of Cairo's refugee world. Psychiatrists say that it is important for peace of mind to live in the present, to come to terms with daily existence, and neither brood about the past nor attach too much meaning to the future; but the refugees trapped in Cairo today, haunted by terrifying memories of loss and savagery, seduced by a longing for a world they perceive as stable and fulfilling, cannot accept the present. Cairo is a prison sentence, to be endured because there is no option. They simply wait...
Cairo is not just one of the most polluted cities in the world; it is dirty, intensely overcrowded, broken down and full of rubble, with roads built up on legs above other roads in an attempt to dispel the traffic jams that paralyse the city for all the day and most of the night. Occasionally, between the brick and the cement, you catch glimpses of filigreed minarets, delicately carved porticoes and arcades, stately facades and the traces of sumptuous courtyards, earlier Cairos of the Islamic mastercrafstmen and Coptic merchants, when the city was a splendid place of pleasure garden and cool palaces, civil servants in their red fezzes strolled along tree-lined avenues and visitors drank sherbet in famous tearooms. It is the utterly derelict nature of the city today that partly makes possible its absorption of so many refugees - 200,000? 500,000? No one can say for sure. Around the city's edges, entrepreneurs keep constructing identical breeze-block buildings in ever-widening circles, leaving the top floor unfinished so that other floors can be added year by year. From the top of the buildings along the Nile, on the rare moments when the smog evaporates and the setting sun lights up the horizon, you can see the Pyramids of Giza, framed by the jagged edges of yet more unfinished blocks. Wherever the buildings are most derelict, the electicity supplies most sporadic, the water least reliable, there the refugees live." (pages 8-9)