Adventures of Isabel

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 [...]

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 [...]

Grad school insanity (in my case) and general Egyptian turmoil (in Hossam’s) have kept us from making much progress on the Tax Collectors’ strike project.  My spring break is coming up, though, so there’s reason to hope it’ll be finished by the end of the month.
In the meantime, a few more slideshows are subtitled and [...]

It’s always  a little sobering to hear about bombs going off in places I’ve recently been.

Khan al Khalili, January 2009.

Al Hussein Mosque

Al-Azhar area
It’s interesting, though, that because I subscribe to the Jaiku feeds of several Cairo-based journalists and bloggers, by the time I woke up this morning I had more detailed and complete news sitting [...]

On my last day in Egypt, I finally made it to the pyramids at Giza. (I had seen them on the way to an interview, but only through the window of a moving car, which doesn’t quite do them justice.)

The whole scene is a rather unpleasant mix of corrupt police, touts, and tour busses, but [...]

I haven’t been posting lately, largely because I’ve been holed up working on the tax collectors project.
Here’s one clip from the project, which shows tax strike leader Abdel Qader Nada explaining some of the conditions that pushed real estate tax collectors to launch a (successful!) strike last year.
This video, along with about a dozen others, [...]

Views from Al-Azhar Park

Real Estate Tax Collectors office, Embaba, Giza.

In preparation for my departure for Cairo this Thursday, I went to the library earlier this week and checked out a couple of guidebooks, basic Arabic self-instruction books, a manual on XML (scripting Arabic is a bit of a nightmare) and a stack of mindless fiction.
So far, I’m making a lot of progress on the [...]

More good news from U.S.-backed dictators around the globe…
Troops under Egypt’s President-for-Life Hosni Mubarak attack striking workers at the Ghazl al-Mahalla textile factory.
This would be the same Hosni Mubarak to whom Bush recently expressed his appreciation for “the long and proud tradition that you’ve had for a vibrant civil society.”Before concluding “I appreciate the example [...]