As one of the many efforts CAC alumni and community continue to do to embetter the environment, they came together this year to change what was once known as a “dump” in our community members' words, to a beautiful medan (square) garden in Maadi after cleaning it up and beautifying it.
As our long time CAC staff and community member Ms. Nadia Rashad explained,
"The Medan (Garden) between Roads 206 and 252 , in front of the Total building has been completely renovated thanks to our neighbors, friends, and instigated by our Alumni parents and students. Also, a big donation came from the group (Race To Clean the Air- a yearly event hosted at CAC). Passers by would simply ask how they can contribute , it could be plants or monetary donations. People have been extremely generous. Please pass by and take photographs to send to our worldwide Alumni friends and colleagues”.
In Aisha’s words (Ms. Rashad’s daughter),
“For as long as I can remember there was a forest in front of our Degla home. First it was nothing but trees that extended from our home all the way to the olive forest ‘Ghabet el Zeitun’. At the time (over 40 years ago), our building was on the outskirts of Maadi. CAC was close to us and resembled more a club that people could wander into than today’s fortress that no one would mistake for a club.
Eventually buildings sprouted up all around us and we are now a tiny speck in a forest of concrete extending all the way to the autostrade and beyond and the dense trees were uprooted and squares took their place with sparse patches of dry grass. Cars belonging to employees in the surrounding offices now double and triple park around the squares and line all the surrounding narrow streets.
The squares became dumping ground for anything and everything. Walking across them from our home to the SHELL building (now it is TOTAL in keeping with the times) to buy coffee or sweets from SHELL Shop, it was normal to find the remnants of a rowdy night, or fights, such as syringes, cough syrup bottles, shards of glass from beer bottles, and styrofoam cups as well as ‘normal’ garbage. We could never get used to the sight and over the years many attempts were made to clean it up, plant it, book a garbage car to pick up the garbage, but always the roundabouts would revert back to their sad and ugly state... until March 2020.
March 2020 will forever be the Corona month in everyone’s memory, but for the residents of this small, but very busy and untidy area of Degla it is a big THANK YOU month... to the people who got together and decided to transform the ugly and dirty roundabouts into something that I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined!
Thank you to the gardener Abdel Sameea.... his incredible imagination and professional landscaping, passion for his work, long hours spent digging and planting... Thank you to CAC’s ‘Race to Clean the Air’ and the Maadi residents and Nadia Rashad and her neighbour Dalia Daoud among many other individuals for their enthusiasm, wisdom, passion, and discrete generosity, to make this project work.
All the factors mentioned above have always been there... but maybe the timing was never right, maybe it took the Corona quarantine (Egyptian style) to get people’s attention, and energy, which would otherwise have been directed at their work or travel and socializing to collaborate and transform a dump into a dream".
