My thoughts on Egypt

Egypt is heavy on my mind. I watch updates online via the BBC and have read reports and blogs from a few other sources and friends.

I feel extremely lucky that I lived in Cairo when I did. Egypt played such a pivotal role in my life, the repercussions of which I still feel and reap the benefits of. I see the reports that are centered in Tahrir Sq. and it brings back a flood of memories; at times I can see across the river to Agouza meaning 'old lady in Arabic', where I shared an apartment with Judy. I can see the original AUC campus where it all began for me in '94. The antiquities Museum where I nearly passed out from heat exhaustion my first week in Cairo. I remember how people would drive their cars round and round Tahrir Sq following a match between Zamalek and Ahly football clubs, honking and singing praises for the victors. So many memories.

I am worried for my friends and old neighbors, so many of which just want to raise their children in a safe, clean country where they feel they have a voice and a choice in their lives and aren't merely at the mercy of an elitist, repressive regime. I am proud that the Egyptian people had been exercising mostly peaceful protest and it angers me that pro Mubarak supports disrupted what was seemingly a democratic and thoughtful protest to years of false promises and hope. This is a big step for a people that are culturally apathetic to their lot in life and in most cases, unsophisticated in their world view due to lack of education and underemployment (or none). Are the pro Mubarak people hired thugs? I don't know. I don't know what to believe. I have fears that Egypt will boil in turmoil only to be overcome by political opportunists who will wrest control with an agenda that does not have the betterment of the Egyptian people at it's heart.

My hope is that this turmoil is the labor pains of the birth of true democracy in Egypt; but I am not so naive as to believe that the worst is over. Time will tell.