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Letter from Cairo: Dust, Settling
You might have encountered Giordano Ciampini over the past few months at Snakes & Lattes, where he is a manager. But Ciampini wears another hat—as a freelance photojournalist. After Hosni Mubarak was ousted as Egypt’s president, Ciampini decided to travel to Cairo and document the revolution’s aftermath. We’ll be sharing his stories as often as he can get them to us.
Egyptians these days are starting to get back to their usual daily routines. Kids are returning to school, businesses are opening back up, and the civilian traffic orderlies, tents, and entrepreneurs in Tahrir Square have all but faded from the nexus of the January 25 revolution.
People here have had the word “no” removed from the common lexicon for so many years that now people say “no” for any and every reason imaginable. But I’m finding that a single, cohesive narrative on the effects of the revolution is quite elusive…maybe it doesn’t exist.
I’ve been to political union meetings, watching the emergence of a new politically active youth. My fixer, Meedo [ed.: for caution’s sake we are using only his nickname], has joined a party—a new kind of experience here.
(A fixer is a networker. Usually someone who’s lived in the country for a significant period, who knows how to connect with people, places, and authorities, and who can ease your way with a quick tongue if you don’t have the linguistic faculty to do so.)
I got a chance to speak with Rami Lakahah, a former speaker in the Majilis Al-Sha’ab, Egypt’s equivalent to our Parliament. “We need good, free elections,” he told me, “and we need parties to be able to express their opinions about the economy.”
Lakahah, who was put on the run for unpaid debts to the Egyptian government, has now
come back in the hope of helping his nation. “Our economy is a key issue,” said Lakahah, pointing to several issues such as creating a “good” internal revenue agency and mainstreaming the underground economy, which has a reported value in excess of 1.4 trillion Egyptian pounds (about $250 million Canadian).
The people I’ve spoken to within the tourism and travel industry are feeling the pinch from the daily protests and rallies, as Egypt is perceived in our part of the world to be unsafe, unstable and unmanageable. Waiid, a young professional working at a local travel agency on Talaat Harb Street, says that tourism needs to come back. “Egypt is good,” he says, taking a pull from a cigarette (smoking is a cultural obsession here in Egypt—I can’t walk for five minutes without seeing ten people light up). “Egyptian people are friendly, we need tourists to come back, it is very important.”
He can’t stress the significance of this enough. While Egyptian cotton, food, and other agri-wares account for a large part of the economy, sites like the Pyramids at Giza, Aswan, and Luxor, the mosques of Old Cairo, and oases throughout the western desert are the mainstay of more than half of the service industry.
Change here may be slow in coming, but as my friend Abo Yossef says, “if anything change, it change with hard work.”
—Giordano
Photos by Giordano Ciampini/Torontoist.