Devotional Trip – Day 11, Site 2 .. Africa!

Read: Exodus 40 (www.biblestudytools.com/nrs/exodus/40.html)
Sing: Child of Blessing, Child of Promise, UMH 611
 
Once we crossed the mid-point of the Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel we were officially in Africa! This is now the third continent I have been in – the first was North America, where I was born and have always lived, the second was Asia, which I visited for the first time just a week and a half ago when we landed in Tel Aviv. I will be going to my fourth continent in just a few days when we change planes in Frankfurt, Germany on our way home.
 
Cairo
Cairo is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in Africa and one of the largest cities in the world. Cairo had its start in the 4th century AD as a Roman fortress on the Nile River. In 641 the Muslims moved their capital here from Alexandria. The area started to be called by the name Cairo in 969.
 
By the time we got to Cairo it was dark. But we could still see quite a bit because it is a well-lit city. The photo below was taken in the morning from the Citadel. You can see the smog that was hanging over the city every day that we were here. But that was only a part of the filth of the city. As we drove along the highways we could see that two or three feet of the inside lane was filled with dirt and trash (but don’t think that anyone paid any attention to lane stripes – they didn’t). This was true of almost every street we saw in and around Cairo. Where they had water canals these too were covered with trash. In Jerusalem we were disturbed to see small trash piles scattered around even the nicer parts of the city. In Cairo this was multiplied by a thousand! They have a lot of work to do in order to clean up this city – but there are 22 million people in Cairo – they could do it if they decided to all pitch in.