I'll be alright

looking at me now
I don't quite see it
but I'll be alright

If there is one thing you could change about Egypt, what would it be?

They asked my younger sister in Georgetown univ. undergrad. admission interview, "If there was one thing you could change about Egypt what would it be?" and in a firm decisive tone she said, "its people"!

I don't know whether to applaude her honesty, or like in the denmark issue dillema, condemn her unsensetive, could be even offending, freedom of speech. her words, little as they may seem, might not only upset the over 70 million subjects in our love it-then hate it-then love it...etc homeland, but will also dissapoint the fairly large anti-government fraction who would have been expecting an answer that is more coherent with thier non-hidden agendas. But let me here borrow what my father said in similar yet more aggressive situation, what my 17-years old sister bluntly said was "Kashef la monshe2", meaning it simply showed what was lieing there unnoticed in the corners of her mind. what she said was there, whether she said it or not.

But what would make a 17 years old girl think this way. She is tolerant, sets up her own charity projects which means she has a fair amount of social awarness. still gets nostalegetic for that tiny village in the Delta where we spent our early childhood. She is a soprano and sings opera yet she accepts and actually cherishes songs my brother listens to thats goes "el bango mish bta3y" and the like. she has always appreciated diversity. and although she confident, pretty and describes herself as a red-carpet-material, she is not vain or fake. She was the first ever to make me notice how the kind of culture that includes an enlarged channel sunglasses along with the prada shoe and the hand bag that worthes a three figure number one noticably find redundant around campus here at AUC, is an indicator of an ugly gap between social classes. she is a strong advocate for social equality. yet she says the thing she want to change about Egypt is its people!

To be saying this in favor of an elitest status quo is not even a possibility for yasmine and the higher social class are in fact so little to be called "the people". why then does yasmine want to change teh people?

Where have all the twittering gone?

They couldn’t destroy all the nests so they decided to cut off the trees. But because it would destroy the sight they decided to trim only the inner branches leaving the tree outer silhouette. Now the trees look more of a soup bowl than a normal tree. Only the outer branches surrounding a big void! It is almost sunset now and normally birds of different kinds would be going round and round and when the sun finally goes down I will start enjoying my daily enchanting dose of a mixture of warbles, trills, whistles and rattles even my cat will be enjoying his daily bird watching ritual. But there are no birds no more. The enchanting twittering and wheezing chirping and chirruping singing are gone. And here I am hearing only monotonous cockroaches and badly missing the good old days. After days of desperate attempts to spot birds from all the windows in the house, my cat now sits idly by me staring emptily at the monitor. I get visions of setting up a society for the protections of Egyptian birds and then the visions start turning disturbing when it shows that the only members are me and my cat! I imagine the two of us standing in Talaat harb square, me hanging a “save the birds” banner on my nick and my cat, disguised as a bird, playing dead by my side.

By leaving all the animal welfare issues aside, Apart from the pain we are causing other able-to-feel-creatures by destroying their habitat, and also apart from the pain they caused to the bird mother by forcibly chasing her off her nest and seeing her young being threw away, and by completely ignoring how is all this cruel and inhuman, from a purely conservation view point, it must be noticed that we are killing our wildlife, first dogs and cats, and now birds! I wonder if the plan is to empty the country out of its baladi breeds is to start exporting more prestigious foreign wildlife!

Several things must me mentioned here, in the UK, All birds, their nest and eggs are protected by the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981, and it is thus an offence to damage or destroy an active nest or prevent parent birds access to their nests. In case of birds such as the barn owl that are listed on Schedule 1 of the Act, it is an offence even to disturb the birds when at or near the nest.
And it continues to the US, Scotland, Portugal, Poland, Norway, Malawi and, No, not Egypt..!

everything descriped above is happening now in "Rehab City", new Cairo