StoryoftheNile

I have been wondering for days what shall I write about. Of course I am going to write about Egypt, but there are too many things to write about in Egypt. Of course I have to take care not to mention the corruption of the political system and its mysterious dealings. I am not going also to write about the pyramids or sphinx; I don’t like playing the tour guide, or the tourism marketer. I think Zahi Hawas alone on the international level is enough. Besides Egypt is not only about politics and monuments. Of course there is more. I can write about the inflation and its amplified symptoms, but it’s not yet the right time for such a specific subject. I think the best thing to write about as the starter of my first blog is youth in Egypt.

Just two weeks ago I was watching the news and the speaker was talking to three of the survivors of a shipwrecked fishing boat close to the Italian shores while transmitting illegal immigrants. The speaker asked them a strange question, however, more weired was there astonishing answer: ” If you find a means will you retry again? Yes, once, twice and thrice until we either die or find a way to get through any other country.” What misery are they living in to think so horribly…Bye the way, they paid big sums of money to those who were transmitting them. Their families sold their houses and took loans to pay them the money they needed. So now they are not only miserable jobless, but also indebted homeless. To sum it up, they are lost. Most of them will try to earn their bread through illegal means. If what is legal is prohibited then what else is there to do.

Since president Sadat’s open policy in the late seventies, the Egyptian middle class started shrinking until it disappeared today by dissolving into the lower classes. That means that the gab between the rich and the poor is pretty big, and that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, especially with the newly adopted random privatization policies and the newly spread monopolies. Few people devour the cake and the rest of a 75 millioned nation has nothing but leftovers found only by the lucky and the sycophant. I will give an example to make life easier. The steel manufacture in Egypt is taken over by the very well known businessman Ahmad Ezz. Every year 40 billion Egyptian pounds are added to his bank account. I am not a Marxist, but it seems very unfair that only whales can survive.

Returning to youth, university graduates in Egypt are so many. Most of them, if not all, have the dream of either immigrating to the New World and start a new life, or working in a gulf country where they can acquire money. unfortunately, none of these dreams come true, except for some exceptions. Adding insult to injury, the National T.V now adopts a new campaign against unemployment. The campaign advertisements play on embarrassing the unemployed youth in front of their families in order to urge them to work as workers in factories. For example psichiatrists can wield metals, and accountants can oil machines, and in return they will be rewarded by a big some of money that will cover only their transportation expenses. In the mean time, the government has recognized the problem, and started solving it by increasing the university fees so that fewer students can get enrolled in the university, and consequently the rest will turn to be craftsmen and skilled workers.

However, not everyone falls as a prey to such predatory beasts, some cling to their high-positioned relatives, who provide them with decent jobs. The situation looks very much like the mouse who befriends the lion to protect him from the cat, and the wolf who befriends the tiger to eat his left overs, and the remora fish which accompanies the shark to eat its teeth in-betweens and so on. On the other hand, others try to study languages and computer programming by paying as much as they can afford to carve their way through granite blocks. Some of them succeed and the rest die before seeing the light. All this comes in a very sharp contrast to the situation of the rich youth. They have the money to get the best education, to pay to get the best jobs, to afford traveling and immigrating, and also they have their own relations that will help them if they do not have the desire to work in their families’ companies.

On a different level, most of those who succeed in getting through to another country, are the best of the best, la creme de la creme. They are either the best qualified and the top ten in their faculties or prosperous or promising businessmen, and Egypt loses them for good.

Mother Egypt is getting weaker and older, not because of age, but because of her grief over her lost children. While the motherly womb is bleeding out of weariness, the heart is torn apart by the axes of poverty, disease, and corruption. In the meantime, She does not take by the doctors’ advice and hold on breeding until she recovers her health. Every day, Mother Egypt delivers thousands of children, clinging to one hope that one of them might grow up, take care of his siblings, and fix what his elder brothers have done.

storyofthenile99@yahoo.com

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