The day started without me being really conscious. Automatic gestures take me out on the street, my feet know the way, they drive me right to the bus stop, I'm walking half-asleep, a part of me is still in the bed and it won't hear of waking up.

Good morning, noisy Cairo, you never fall asleep, you've been watching on my sleeping. I won't hear you, at least for the following 20 minutes. You can throw on me your dust, you can scream with your horns, you can hang on me your flat grey pollution colored sky. It's useless: I'm too drowsy to hear you.

The bus number 103 is approaching. It stops. Such a weird thing: it usually slows down only. So much the better: I can get in without jumping . The last leg of my way is on foot, you can easily recognize UNHCR office from the crowd, mostly Sudanese and Somali, a silent crowd standing and waiting on the street, out of the gate, with their despair and their expectations. They were told that there's an office that distributes hope. Everybody has the right to hope. I'm an instrument of this hope. Suddenly I feel so awake, my day starts as soon as I see these people in the street, my people, before getting into the office. Many of them have been already admitted in the courtyard, they are sitting motionless, a veil of patient sadness in their eyes.

I meet some of our interpreters on the stairs, our precious interpreters: they have the magic key of the mysterious world of many cultures. I find some appointments slips on my desk, every slip has a number, every number is a story, a story of stolen lives, denied freedom, humiliated dignity.

There's a young Dinka woman sitting in front of me now. She got married recently here in Egypt to a Sudanese man. He is her second husband. She was married before: no traces of her first husband. She lost him during an attack to her village in the South. She had two children as well: they also have been cancelled by the violence. Nothing remains of that previous life, nothing but a shocked pain to evidence that there was another life earlier.

I have to ask about that lost life, relegated to a hidden corner of the conscience in order to make it innocuous, innocuous to the memory. But now everything quickly comes to the surface -- painful, unbearable. I can see her tears falling silently, and I just stop for a while. Certain pains will never pass. I feel so bad for having been asked her to recall all this. I interview her new husband, I check the documents and everything is fine. Hopefully she will be resettled in the United States or maybe in Canada. She leaves my office with her husband and I accompany her with my look, saying to myself that all that follows for her will be good because she has already had her overdose of pain.

The big dark eyes of this child are staring at me astonished and a little bit fearful. He is sitting on his mother's knees. He could be two years old, more or less. I smile, he is still suspicious -- a child's confidence is something that is to be won. His mother is telling me that she has no birth certificate for her child because she was cheated by a man who promised to marry her, then, when she got pregnant, he abandoned her. There's no father for this child, because his father decided not to be his father.

Now he has explored my desk enough, he needs something else to be interested in, he doesn't want to sit anymore, he complains and tries to escape from his mother's arms. I'd like to tell him: you're right, this is quite a boring place for a child, but wait….I've something for you in my drawer. This is a magic drawer: here's a car, or do you prefer a rag doll? I even have two whales, orange and green, little ones sure, otherwise they couldn't fit in the drawer. He really looks interested. I tell his mother to let him sit on the carpet with the toys, I leave my desk for a while and I show him how fast my car goes. He smiles.

Now we can continue, Madam -- trying to give "legality" to such a perfect creature who exists and smiles in spite of missing fathers and papers. You won't miss your father, my dear child, because you don't even know about his existence. But maybe he will miss you one day, because he knows.

Late in the afternoon I meet a young boy who managed to find his little brother, lost one year ago. I listen to them one by one. They recall the story in a plain way with a sort of resignation, giving me names, details, the same names, the same details for each of them. I look at them: they are so much alike! Their faces, their ears. I ask the youngest one to draw a sketch: "I didn't go to school, but I will try." He is awkward in handling the pen, but the drawing is clear. Thank you.

I let them wait for five minutes, I go out of the office, just round the corner to buy something to drink. It was a long day, they have been waiting for their turn since morning. I give my positive answer and we find the time to share some coke cans before they leave.

It's already dark outside. All refugees left. Now it's time to write assessments. The work is not yet over. I'm on the stairs again, the last time for today, I look at the clock on the wall to sign out: 8:15 p.m.. Twelve hours in the office. I won't go by bus, I really feel I need to walk.

Good evening, noisy Cairo. I cannot hear your voice now.

There's no more place in my mind. Maybe you think I'm alone…I'm not alone. The looks, the words, the anxieties, the tears and the children of the refugees I met are with me. Can't you see it?

I won't ask their voices to be silent inside me, no. I'll just ask them to speak in a low voice, so that I can sleep this night. I will not ask what's the logic that makes somebody sitting behind the desk and somebody else in front of it. I will not ask why somebody cries and somebody else doesn't.
This is above our understanding. What I've done today for those tears? Maybe not so much: only a drop. I just feel that this drop and those tears belong to the same ocean.

My dear, patient reader, maybe I should have explained to you the technical procedures I use in my work of Family Unity, the criteria I use to identify wives, husbands and children and which is the logic that allows me to establish whether somebody can be considered a member of a family or not, or which are the guidelines we follow in order not to separate families, but I chose another way to speak about my work, because guidelines are always there, everybody can read them, while people are different, they pass maybe only one time in front of you, they are unique. So listen to them, because maybe you will never have the opportunity to see them again.