Dan Jackson/Manifest Photography -Haggadah Project

The van dropped us off in a small shopping district about 15 minutes away. Having to buy otc pharmaceuticals in a foreign place is unnerving and, in Egypt, something I wouldn’t do without a translator. We went into the pharmacy and Mohammed said something in Arabic to the pharmacists behind the counter. The girls behind the counter had traded their traditional robes in for  white lab coats (hussies.) The pharmacist looked at me and started asking me all kinds of personal questions in perfect and seemingly loud english. I finally find someone in Alexandria I can converse with and we are discussing my bodily functions. And why is he shouting? He says something to one of the girls who writes something on a piece of paper and we walked over to a small counter across the room. Slipped the paper under the glass and a green box of pills came sliding back at me. The man behind the glass said something in Arabic to Mohammed and he translated “take 2 after each meal.” There is only one english word on the box “Streptoquin.” Outside the pharmacy I popped a pill out of the blister pack and swallowed it.

Discovered later that Streptoquin is a potent Egyptian-made antibiotic used to treat E.Coli and that it has been banned by the W.H.O.