Egypt

I’ve been watching the Egyptian situation with a personal interest. I was in Alexandria for 10 days last spring, staying with an old school friend and her Egyptian husband and son. My friend flew back to the UK for a brief, long-planned visit with her parents the day before Cairo airport closed. Had she known events would escalate as they have she would have stayed there. She’s now worried about whether she will be able to return as planned.

Her husband and son had driven from Alexandria to Cairo, skirting the problem areas, to take her to the airport on their way to her husband’s village outside Cairo where they have a house and numerous relatives. The internet has been down, even if they had had access in the village, and SMS messaging has been virtually non-existant. I’ve managed to speak to both her husband and son over the last few days on the mobile phone and they assure me they are safe and well but here we have all been worrying about what will happen next. Now, tonight, I watch the mounting violence on the news with horror.

The point is, for me, we learn about this sort of thing in the news all the time; somewhere in the world someone is living in fear of their life. We watch events unfold and decry the waste of life, the devastating effects on society; feel for the people involved and hope that everything works out in the end. Then something happens in a place we’ve been to and to people we know and care about. The shock, fear, sympathy we thought we’ve felt in the past pales beside the horror of realising it’s now personal.

I first went to Egypt 30 odd years ago when my friend first married, then again last year. Everyone I met on both occasions was kind, interested, proud of their country and eager to make sure I felt welcome. Egypt changed a lot in the 30 years between my visits, more western-style shops and malls, fewer markets for example – better toilets! What hadn’t changed was the good-hearted interest towards a visitor.

I shudder now to think of the good people I met, in the midst of all this terror. I hope to go back to Egypt later this year and I hope this trouble will be behind them. Do I care about the Egyptian people as a whole? Yes, but I confess to a greater concern for those individuals I know, and pray they are all there and safe when I return.