A vendor reaches for a hot sweet potato cooking atop the stove on his cart.

"I came here from Fayyum," he said, briskly slicing a potato along its length with a small wooden-handled knife. He then wrapped it in a page torn from a magazine whose advertisements showed cars, furniture, and other items: things that he will never own. His wife and five children remain in Fayyum, far from Cairo, Gomah explained. He can occasionally scrape together the fare to visit them.

As we speak, a policeman notices that Gomah is blocking a busy pedestrian intersection and tells him to move. When the sweet potato man talks back, reluctant to leave his busy spot, the policeman yells in a different tone. With stoic resignation, Gomah picks up the handles of his cart and drags it thirty feet to another spot. Later that evening, he will stretch out atop his cart to sleep, just like the man I'd met years before in the heart of the Khan al-Khalili.

Ben Barber is State Department correspondent for the Washington Times.