Demonstrators stand atop a partially dismantled concrete barrier across downtown Cairo’s Mohammed Mahmoud Street. However, with new walls being erected around the nearby Ministry of Interior, the title of this post might better be …and more walls go up.
These photos are from August 1, but better late than never, right? It was quite difficult to photograph on this day, with foreigners particularly singled out for confiscation of cameras/memory cards. In fact, I myself nearly had my camera taken from me by soldiers—fortunately, a decade of violin lessons left me with an unusually strong grip, so let it never be said that music is a waste of time.
The conditions left me shooting on the fly or from the hip, so none of these photos are great. But for the sake of posterity, they can be found here.
I returned to Cairo Tuesday night, after a few days rest on the beach in Sinai. I won’t even pretend to have the background necessary to comment usefully on the recent attacks along the Israeli border. One observation though: during my brief visit, I was struck by both how heavily militarized the region is, and by how completely ineffective that militarization appeared to me to be.
Taking the bus from Cairo to the Red Sea and back, one passes through numerous military checkpoints. However, the only object of these checkpoints, at least that I could discern, was to single out all non-Arab passengers for a passport check. (Which, in my case, consisted of thumbing ineptly through my documents for a minute or two, finding an Egyptian visa from three years ago, and then tossing them back.) I was tempted to ask what they were actually looking for: Dangerous visa-overstayers? Israeli operatives too unsophisticated to travel on false documents?
Like so many things (the US’s TSA, for example, or the fake metal detectors in my Jakarta office), this strikes me as typical security-state mentality—A big show of weaponry and personnel, a flexing of muscles, but no discernible strategy.
A protestor injured in Abbaseya gets an IV in a makeshift clinic in the Tahrir Square tent city, on the night of July 23–24.
Another injured protestor convalesces in Tahrir Square. Throughout the night, more and more injured people were carried into the tent city.
A woman sleeps beneath revolutionary graffiti on the Mogamma building.
I’ve been told the green lettering reads “revolution,” growing out of the red lettering for “martyrs”
I really have no idea what to say about this particular fashion statement
Neither nightfall, the start of the work week tomorrow, nor stuffy ideas about appropriate children’s bedtimes seem to put a damper on the carnival spirit in Tahrir Square.
The slideshows of the Tax Collectors strike leaders are now available with Spanish subtitles at Egipte rera la Barricada.
Well done. (¡Muy bien hecho!)
I’ve been hard at work making slideshows from interviews and photo sessions Hossam and I did in Egypt, and I’m finally on the home stretch. You can follow my progress on my vimeo account
I think this video is my favorite from the project. In the West, I we’re too often taught to assume that a woman in hijab — an Arab, a Muslim, a wife and a mother — is automatically a victim, passive and oppressed. I wish we got to see more of women like Mervat, who plays an active role in agitating for her own rights and those of her colleagues. She was on the front lines of the struggle to unionize the tax collectors, sleeping on the streets during the strike, facing down government officials, and persevering despite threats against her and her family.
It’s also quite touching to see the support she gets from her husband and son.
I haven’t been on here much lately, for which I am truly sorry. (Work, chaos, agonizing about the future and arranging a summer position at the Jakarta Post and a research trip to Mindanao, about which more later.)
But I interrupt the silence to announce that the Egypt’s Real Estate Tax Collectors, whose story I’m working on telling in a multimedia package, handed in yesterday the paperwork necessary to formally establish their union — Egypt’s first independent trade union in half a century.
Mabrouk to the Tax Collectors.
And watch this space. The multimedia project — or at least the English-language version of it — will be completed by May 7.
It seems like most of the people in my life have had to deal with a lot of negativity from me lately. So, to counter it, here’s a short and (thankfully) by no means comprehensive list of things that have made me smile in the last few days:
