Egyptian Scribbles: On Being "Rushed" to Hospital in Cairo

Monday 5 November 2007

On Being "Rushed" to Hospital in Cairo

I’m not sure about the general logistics of dying in Cairo. But I do know this: if you are “rushed” to the hospital in an ambulance, you sure as hell aren’t likely to survive. I’m not talking about the medical care. I’m talking about the traffic. I’ve seen ambulances attempt to navigate the Cairo traffic on a couple of occasions now. Do cars get out of the way in a show of communal care?? Do they hell…. I admit that there isn’t exactly anywhere for these cars to go. Most pavements are 1) crowded with people and 2) have about a meter drop to the floor. And the roads are constantly packed. But I think a little more effort could be made so that the ambulance doesn’t simply sit grid-locked with the rest of the vehicles, sirens a-blaring… Usually, the ambulance driver gets on the microphone to make an appeal. My roommate told me that her boyfriend

(who speaks Arabic) listened to one of these appeals. “There’s a man dying in here!! Move over!! Move over!!,” the driver screamed. “Are you heartless people who do not care about a dying man??” “Move over!! Move over!”. After a few minutes of screaming, the sirens stopped. “Fine. No need to move over now,” the driver continued to yell, “He’s dead.”
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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."