Weekly photo challenge: Everyday life

Everyday life for a soldier in Egypt in 1941 included some pretty unpostable activities:  rifle practice, wrecking tanks, sinking ships, covering  the bodies of dead comrades in the desert.  However, the activity in this photo looks fairly harmless.  My father captioned it ‘Shufty’, which comes from an Arabic word for ‘a look’, as in ‘take a shufty at this’.

Three curious things I’ve considered:  What are the tubular projections behind the men?  What is the Egyptian boy doing?  Why is one man naked while all others are clothed?

Shufty, Egypt, 1941

9 Replies to “Weekly photo challenge: Everyday life”

  1. Thank you for the original take on the challenge. I never would have thought of everyday life for a soldier in 1941. 🙂

  2. this one really caught my interest
    I’m also interested to no the story behind it, is there any other similar in the same album?

  3. All I know is that they are Australian soldiers on a beach somewhere in the Middle East, probably Egypt or Libya, which was where the Australians were stationed. Unless it was Palestine (as it was then). There are many photos of soldiers mucking around. But it’s always hard to know where the photos were taken, so I avoid posting the obscure ones.

  4. its fascinating how the picture shows whats behind.. the daily life of the soldiers
    btw shufty is not a proper Arabic word, but Egyptian colloquial, it could be/mean look or see but still verbally wrong as the Y “ي” is used to feminize the word shuf (shouf), many foreigners got lost with the colloquial tongue. “Shufty” as written above literately means “did u see?” I’m not sure what he meant but this must be Egypt, the boy is a fellah from the Nile valley & not an arab (bedouin) from the way he’s dressed I guess
    sharing the obscure ones may lead others to give us more infos about it, don’t u think?

  5. Thanks for this extra info. What is a ‘fellah’? Can you tell me the difference between an Arab boy and a fellah?

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