Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 November 1908 — DIFFICULT CENSUS TAKING [ARTICLE]

DIFFICULT CENSUS TAKING

A Delicate Task in Egypt—Discovering of the Harems. The country for the last tew days has been going through a series of questions and answers. It is the period of the decennial census. At home the taking of the census is a comparatively easy matter. Every householder has his or her sheet to All up on a certain night and the collector fetches it on his rounds, and there the matter ends. But in Egypt there are insuperable difficulties in the way of such simple methods. To begin with as the illiterate class is large, it is manifestly impossible to get the forms filled in, writes a Cairo correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette. So the Government has had to nominate an army of inspectors, who have been going from house to house and have powers to penetrate to the inner apartments in order to obtain full details. Of course in a number of cases the natives, not understanding the cause, resent this intrusion, and some of the incidents have been awkward. Moreover, very few of the fellaheen really know their ages, tneir idea or time being fixed by events, ’thus one man’s reply to the questioner was that he was a boy working in his father’s field when Alexandria was bombarded, and another that he remembered seeing the “miuKa fransawiya,” evidently the Empress Eugenie, .at the opening of the Suez Canal. On the other hand the women, unlike their Western sisters, do not consider age a thing to be ashamed of and unblushingly admit, in sone cases, quite ten years more than possibly is their age. The harems have been another obstacle to the completeness of the census, and in many instances the inspectors have had warm quarters of an hour with the surly and unwilling eunuchs who guard those portions of the Easterner’s domicile. Altogether the lot of a census inspector is by no means a happy one arid it cannot be wondered at that • many of them fight shy of the job The task requires no end of tact., patience and persuasive power ana, considering the difficulties in the way and the fact that the inspectors are empowered to hale recalcitrant inhabitants before the nearest magistrate or mainour it speaks volumes for th. able manner in which the inspectors have tackled their delicate task tnat very few cases hav6 been reported.