Al Jazeera (19 Dec 2021) — “We Do the Police’s Job: Defending Lebanon’s Most Lawless Towns”
Photo: Jacob Boswall / Al Jazeera
At 11pm on a mild October night, headlights from five SUVs pierce through the darkness in Halba, the capital of Akkar – Lebanon’s rugged, northernmost governorate.
More than a dozen young men mill about, trading jokes and smoking cigarettes in matching camouflage hunting jackets. Some are municipal police, but most are volunteers with Halba’s “haras al-baladiyeh”, or town protectors. Together, they keep a nightly vigil over the slumbering provincial town, on the lookout for trouble.
“Jump in boys,” says Maher Khaled el-Ali, a chatty 38-year-old town protector, motioning to a black SUV marked “Halba Municipality”. Also joining Maher are two 20-something colleagues: Walid, a stocky local mechanic, and the imposing, powerfully built Abdullah Abdelwahab Hammoud.
The vehicle springs to life and takes off into Halba’s deserted urban sprawl. After two minutes, it abruptly stops. Maher and his two fellow town protectors go to the boot without explanation.
The trio reappears with white plastic chairs, which they neatly line up on the sidewalk. The chosen spot lies on the main road through town, surrounded by drab, low-rise apartment buildings – with barely a light on inside. Only cicadas and the occasional passing car break the silence.
The Saturday night “doriyyeh” or security patrol has begun […]
Click here to read the full article.
The Guardian (12 Apr 2019) — “Cairo’s Violent Waste Wars Pit Sorters Against Startups”
Photo: Danilo Balducci / Sintesi / Sipa / Rex / Shutterstock
“People do not just fight over garbage here, I have seen them fight to the death over garbage,” says Samaan Girgis. “There are no rules in this job.”
Girgis is one of the Zabaleen (Arabic for “garbage people”), Cairo’s army of informal workers that collects refuse for conversion into valuable raw materials. Girgis lives with his family in the suburb of Manshiyet Nasr, nicknamed “Garbage City”, which is home to Egypt’s largest and most influential Zabaleen community.
Egypt generates about 80 million tonnes of solid rubbish annually, according to government figures. The Zabaleen have supplemented the state’s woefully inadequate waste infrastructure for seven decades. Each morning, their collectors fan out across Cairo, bringing home mountains of rubbish for women and children to sort through.
In recent years, startup companies have begun offering local residents money for sorted recyclable materials. Mina Bahr, who founded RecycoLife in 2015, advertises household collections on social media and then sends workers to buy valuable waste such as plastics and aluminium. Bahr says he incentivises residents to get involved because he lacks the Zabaleen’s manpower for sifting through rubbish.
But RecycoLife’s business model conflicts with that of the Zabaleen’s. “The Zabaleen want waste for free because [they see it as] their right,” Bahr said …
Click here to read the full article.
Photo: David Wood
Roads & Kingdoms (13 Aug 2018) — “The Resilient Rally Drivers of the Egyptian Desert”
Photo: Kareem Fouda / Trackerazzi Noise
Claes Raben, a Cairo-based interior designer from Denmark, turns his Jeep sharply off the highway and onto the jagged terrain of Egypt’s unforgiving Eastern Desert.
“I packed a shisha pipe and a few beers, just in case these guys take a while to come back,” he says. I had hitched a ride just after sunrise from seaside resort El Gouna to join a ragtag convoy, rumbling its way towards an agreed point about a mile inland from the Red Sea.
Here, beneath a craggy hill, these obscure coordinates would serve as both start and finish for April’s El Gouna Rally Special, the latest installment in the Egyptian domestic rally raid championship.
Raben begins heating coals for the shisha pipe while his wife, Dalia Abou-Senna, unpacks a generous spread of sandwiches, dips, and pastries. Such is the leisurely lot of the rally raid spectator, who rises at dawn to cheer on an eclectic mix of modified cars and dune buggies, only to see them plunge over the horizon, vanishing on a far-off adventure.
But in a country wracked with paranoia about the desert’s lurking security threats—some real, some imagined—even getting to the starting line is a victory.
Rally racing has a proud history in Egypt. In 1982, a band of European motoring enthusiasts arranged the inaugural Rallye des Pharaons—a grueling, days-long trek that usually started in the shadow of the Great Pyramid at Giza. The international event drew teams from across the globe, with many considering it second only to the Dakar Rally as the sport’s most formidable test.
But a series of ugly incidents has threatened the very existence of Egypt’s dedicated rally scene. In 2013, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi launched a crackdown against Islamist terrorists in the northern Sinai desert, which remains mired in armed conflict. Violence has also sporadically flared up in the Western Desert; insurgents operating there carried out a deadly attack on Egyptian police forces as recently as October 2017.
In 2015, the Egyptian armed forces unwittingly opened fire on a Mexican tour group during a anti-militant operation in the Western Desert, killing twelve and injuring ten. The military stated that the tourists were in an off-limits area at the time of the incident.
Haunted by this human tragedy and public relations disaster, the government imposed even sterner restrictions on accessing the Western Desert, a sprawling wonderland of verdant oases, mountainous dunes, and fast sand-trails. Today, rally events can only take place in the Eastern Desert—the expanse east of the Nile River stretching towards the Red Sea—which offers neither the enormous scale nor the varied terrain of the west.
The competitors anxiously mill around before the El Gouna Rally Special, confirming final instructions and finishing off last cigarettes. The starting grid takes shape, engines roar, and the vehicles soon disappear from view.
The fans tailgate, Egyptian-style, while the competitors sweat under racing jumpsuits and intense competitive pressure. Each co-pilot calls frantic directions as the vehicles negotiate a winding, 164-mile course around rocky outcrops and unpassable valleys.
The occasional walkie-talkie dispatch gives flashes of information to supporters about the drama unfolding inside the desert. One car crashes, causing serious injury to the co-pilot’s thumb. Another team soon stops to assist, sacrificing precious time and concentration.
Around four hours later, a monstrous red and black buggy reappears on the horizon as suddenly as it left, hurtling over the dunes to claim first place. Rahhala Total Racing Team has dominated the Egyptian rally scene in recent years, and this latest triumph comes as little surprise.
Weeks later, I caught up with Ahmed Sergany—who runs Egypt’s domestic rally championship together with Alain Besancon—in Cairo’s gaudy Mall of Egypt. His eyes twinkle as he reminisces about the golden age of Egyptian desert racing.
“Rally in Egypt used to be cross-country—literally!” says Sergany. “The [Rallye des] Pharaons organizers could point to anywhere on the map and go.”
In any country, planning a rally raid event poses logistical challenges. Sergany, a jeweller by trade, devotes countless hours to crafting each race’s course and generating the all-important road book—an instruction manual setting out the trail’s coordinates, contours, and hazards in painstaking detail. “This is the fun part,” says Sergany.
Far less enjoyable is the struggle to secure race permission from the Egyptian government, an administrative behemoth notorious—at the best of times—for its opaque, often-inscrutable procedures. “Getting the permits is hell,” says Sergany.
For weeks before each race, Sergany must cajole no fewer than eight separate state entities into allowing the event to take place. The permit applications require precise coordinates of the proposed course, detailed evacuation plans and identification documents for every team member, which currently totals around 200 people.
After jumping through these bureaucratic hoops, the most brutal sting lingers in the tail of the process. Sergany and his rally colleagues must wait until 5 p.m. the day before each rally to receive final approval from the Egyptian army, which has full discretion to call off the event. The competitors, support crews, and spectators had all trekked out to a starting line deep in the Western Desert in 2015, only for the military to withdraw permission on the eve of the rally …
Click here to read the full article.
New African (Jan 2019) — “Saudi Tycoon Takes On Egypt’s Al Ahly”
The Switchers (October 2018) — “Fruit Trees Invade Balconies, Rooftops and Oil Tankers with Egyptian Agricultural Project”
Photo: Shagrha
One day, Omar Eldeeb was returning from his job as a petroleum engineer when a peculiar scene caught his eye — there, beside his apartment building in Obour City, a stranger was eating from a public fruit tree. The incident struck Eldeeb with its potential for providing cheap, sustainable nourishment for many Egyptians. “I became very interested and thought to myself, ‘What if we could feed people from the streets?’”
Eldeeb started formulating the concept of Shagrha, his non-governmental organization that coordinates tree-planting on rooftops, balconies and public spaces across Egypt. Since April 2016, Eldeeb has drawn in legions of dedicated volunteers with an agricultural concept as powerfully simple as the name Shagrha — “Plant it!” in Arabic. Shagrha wants to channel this can-do ethos and cover Egypt’s available space with life-giving trees.
Shagrha’s mission takes on special importance in Egypt, a country facing an increasingly drastic food shortage. 16 percent of Egyptians have “poor access to food,” according to the World Food Programme. Separately, large Egyptian cities suffer from a chronic lack of trees and parks. A Cairo University study found that the Egyptian capital offers just 1.5 square meters of green space per resident. The average amount amongst large African cities is 74 square meters, while Cape Town boasts a luxurious 290 square meters for every local.
Shagrha brought a verdant green hue to Cairo’s bleak, sandswept cityscape, getting trees growing wherever possible: by roadsides, from balconies, on rooftops. Eldeeb even installed a hydroponic garden on top of his employer’s petroleum tanker — apparently (and perhaps unsurprisingly) a world first.
According to Eldeeb, Shagrha has already planted 25,000 trees in Egypt, supported 1,000 new rooftop gardens and run 100 community events about urban agriculture. But Eldeeb does not plan to rest on his laurels, devising ambitious targets for securing a long-term sustainable future for his project.
Click here to read the full article.
New African (March 2018) — “Bizarre Battle to Save Lives”
Mada Masr (Sept 2016) — “Why Are Private Egyptian Hospitals Recruiting Nursing Staff from Overseas?”
Photo: gounanursing.org
Mechell, a Filipina nurse, strides into an upmarket restaurant in Sheikh Zayed City, Greater Cairo. She casually makes a request of a waiter in Egyptian Arabic, and then transitions immediately into speaking impeccable English. She appears totally at ease in her foreign surroundings.
Mechell has travelled a great distance to work as a nurse on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital. Around 9,000 kilometres lie between her native Philippines and her current employer, a leading private hospital on the outskirts of Cairo.
At present, Egyptian private hospitals employ a significant number of foreign nurses, from locations as far-flung as India, Bulgaria and Algeria. Three quarters of Mechell’s nursing unit are from the Philippines.
Egypt currently faces a chronic nursing shortage. A 2015 World Health Organisation report found there are 14.8 nurses and midwives to every 10,000 Egyptians. This ratio amounts to barely half of the global benchmark figure of 28.6 nurses. By comparison, Egypt does not suffer from a human resources shortfall as severe as this with doctors, pharmacists or dentists. In this climate, Egypt’s private medical sector has turned its gaze overseas to fill nursing job vacancies, even though these foreign nationals usually command much higher salaries than their Egyptian counterparts.
At first glance, this trend of hiring non-Egyptian nurses appears puzzling. Egypt’s overall unemployment is currently around 13 percent, with youth unemployment exceeding 30 percent. Tertiary educational institutions throughout the country offer nursing training courses. Labor laws protect Egyptian citizens against competition for jobs from foreign nationals and, in theory, companies may only employ non-Egyptian workers if no appropriately qualified local citizen has applied for the same position. For these reasons, Egyptian nurses have little difficulty obtaining employment after graduation. Mohamed Fakih, chief nursing officer at Cairo’s Al-Salam International Hospital, issues a “challenge … to find any nurse in Egypt who is not working.”
Given high unemployment rates and job availability in the field, why do Egyptians shy away from careers in nursing? Ayman Sabae, right to health researcher for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and a trained doctor, traces this widespread aversion to social stigma.
The work of nurses, he says, is undervalued. “They are often seen as second-class citizens, who provide services similar to a maid or cleaner.” Sabae sees this social bias manifest in popular cultural portrayals of nurses, who usually feature in films and television shows as lazy, crass and “completely incompetent” characters. The Nurses Syndicate railed against this hurtful media image in 2010, unsuccessfully lobbying the Ministry of Culture to cancel a Ramadan soap opera that featured a corrupt and unethical nurse …
Click here to read the full article.