When I started this blog I promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those bloggers who opens blog posts with “sorry it’s been so long since I last posted”. As a strong believer in the phrase “If you have nothing important to say then just say nothing”, I felt it is much better just to post as often as you think of something worth posting about and not worry if it’s a while between posts. However, when I made that promise I didn’t think it would be nearly a year between my posts. So here we go: sorry it’s been so long since I last posted.
When I moved out to Egypt I knew the first year would be tough. After all there has been a certain amount of disruption to the continuity of ICT teaching at the school I’ve moved to and a lot of work needed to be done. I didn’t however bank on having revolutions, earthquakes, stabbings and last minute escapes from the country to contend with as well. So here I am, less than a couple of months until the end of the academic year with my first blog post.
I have a few blog posts in draft format which I’ve been trying to post for a while now, but what with everything I just haven’t had the time to finish them. However, I will get back to them very soon. Promise. In the meantime, because a bunch of people have been asking and even though it’s not really related too much to education or teaching which is what this blog was supposed to be about, here’s a quick summary of what happened back in January…
Thursday, 20th January 2011
A perfectly ordinary day at school. Living in a Muslim country our weekend is Friday and Saturday so Thursday was our last day before the weekend. So we’d finished work and went to a friend’s house to help celebrate her birthday. A disappointing turn-out after a whole load of people phone to say they can’t get through because there are some sort of protests going on on their route in. We have a great night anyway, head home and go to bed thinking no more of it.
Friday, 21st January 2011
I wake up surprisingly early for a weekend and after my usual morning routine go to check my e-mail. Now we’ve been having problems with our Internet connection, which I thought were sorted now. So when I discover that the Internet is down again I’m a little annoyed and go to ring our ISP yet again to see what the problem is this time. This is when I start to realize something is not as it should be because although I have full signal on my phone I find that it doesn’t work. I cannot call anybody. I send a couple of text messages and get error messages. So I assume that the phone network is down, after all these things happen. It’ll be back soon enough right?
A couple of hours later Lu wakes up and I let her know we have no net or phones and we get on with our day. I don’t remember now which of us it was, but one of us looks out the window at some point and realizes that there’s a group of Egyptian men on the street outside holding a mixture of metal bars, broom handles, kitchen knives and other weapons of convenience. Not an average day it seems. Getting a little more concerned now we decide it might not be a terrible idea to double lock the front door, just in case.
As our land line phone has never worked we can’t try that. Our mobile phones don’t work and we have no Internet. We don’t have any way of contacting anybody else so we basically bunker down and decide to wait out whatever it is that’s going on. Surely it won’t go on for long? We’d heard about large protests the night before and figure that worst-case scenario there’s more protests going on and they’ve got out of control. But life will probably get back to normal in an hour or two.
Saturday, 22nd January 2011
A new day and still no Internet, still no phones and still armed men on the street outside. We start getting a bit worried until we see that our boab (doorman) is one of the Egyptian men on the street outside. So, we reason, at least the armed men outside are protecting the building. At least we aren’t here on our own if things go bad. It was worrying however that whatever was going on was worrying the locals enough for them to need to be there defending the street at all.
Later in the day we get a call on my mobile from the deputy head at school. Looks like the phones were back on. This is the first time we realise the extent of what has been happening throughout Egypt. The mobile phone network had been taken down by the security forces to try and stop the protesters being able to coordinate with each other. The land line network was uneffected and our deputy head and head teacher had been trying to get through to us since the day before but, of course, our land line doesn’t work. We’re told that school is closed for at least tomorrow and probably Monday and we should just stay inside, keep our heads down and wait it out.
Now, we have no Internet. Our flat didn’t come with a TV and we haven’t bothered getting one because we can get stuff to watch on the Internet anyway. We had intermittent access to telephones and we couldn’t go out anywhere. Boredom ensued. With nothing really to do and stuck in the flat it was a long day.
As it turned out – the night was longer.
We head to bed early out of sheer boredom and just as we’re settling down to sleep we start to hear a lot of commotion coming from a couple of streets away. Mostly shouting and general sounds of a large crowd of people. The shouting sounds quite angry, but its hard to tell. Looking out of the window we try to see if we can see anything. All we can really see is people on balconies of apartments at the end of the street looking out in the direction of the shouting and people occasionally running past the end of our street. After a little while of lying awake in bed listening to this we start to hear gunfire. Then more gunfire. Looking out of the window we see more people running around but still can’t get any idea of what’s actually happening.
It was around now that we decided that a double locked door might not be good enough if worst comes to the worst and after hearing what we’d been hearing its safe to say we were imagining the worst. So we went to rearrange the furniture in the living room to barricade the door. Satisfied that only the most determined group of looters would be able to get in we went back to bed.
Sunday, 23rd January 2011
Now that we have phones again, for the most part, we managed to find out that the police had all gone and the noise we heard last night was the police station being broken into and the weapons stolen. There were absolutely no police anywhere. The policeman normally outside school (next door to us) was gone. The police stationed outside the British Consulate (just behind our apartment) were gone and there were rumours of looters roaming around, which is why there were men on the street protecting the neighbourhood, taking it in six hour shifts. There were, we heard, even local civilians taking it upon themselves to take over directing traffic and keep traffic moving since there we no traffic police to do it.
Some people from the school had gone for a walk around the area we all live in and found that there were manned barricades stopping anybody they didn’t know and stopping all vehciles to find out what they were doing. We heard that the army had tanks at checkpoints to each entrance into the area. That at least made us feel a bit safer with the situation and as we were getting low on supplies I went to the local supermarket to stock up. When I got there it seemed like a lot of other people had had the same idea and there wasn’t an awful lot in the shops any more to stock up with. But I bought what I could and came home again to re-barricade the door.
Things started to get a bit less scary from this point as we knew more about what was happening and felt as secure as we could be where we were. Of course the worry was always there that although we were okay at the moment what would happen if things got worse?
Monday 24th – Monday 31st January 2011
Things carried much as they were for a week. We heard snippets of information from outside but with still no Internet news was slow and came in chunks. We knew about what was happening in Cairo. We knew that Mubarek was clinging on to power. We heard rumours, some of which I still don’t know whether there is any truth in them or not. Rumours about train tracks being pulled up so there were no trains to Cairo running. Rumours about mass breakouts from the country’s prisons since the police disappeared. Rumours about car-jackings on the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria. The word from the FCO in London was that British Expats living in Egypt should seek to leave the country through commercial means if it is safe to do so. However with no way of getting to Cairo and with the security of the route even as far as Alexandria’s two airports very unclear we felt increasingly trapped.
News circulated that it might be possible for the British Consulate to arrange safe-passage as far as the airport for any British citizens wanting to leave the country but of course that wouldn’t help unless we could get tickets on a plane. We didn’t want to risk going to the airport and then getting stranded there with no way to get safely back to the apartment again if we couldn’t get a flight out. We decided we wouldn’t go to the airport unless we knew we had seats on a flight out.
As we had no Internet and since all the local travel agents were now shut for the foreseeable future this presented a problem. We rang home to see if friends and family in the UK could arrange flights for us, but UK travel agents were telling people that there were no flights leaving Alexandria. The FCO did not have any plans to charter a flight for British citizens and the feeling was that such a flight was very unlikely. However other governments were chartering flights out and there was some hope that there may be spare seats either on a flight arranged by the Turkish government or on a flight organised by the German government.
After being assured that safe passage back home again was guaranteed if we didn’t get a flight we decided to take the secure transport to the airport and try to get on either the German or Turkish flights.
Tuesday, 1st - Sunday 6th February 2011
To cut a long story short, after a shorter wait than we expected, we managed to get a flight to Germany. From there, after successfully dodging the media who were apparently waiting to greet those fleeing Egypt, we got a connecting flight to Leeds and home. We were only in the UK for a few days watching the news and attending a rally in London outside the Egyptian embassy to show our support for our friends in Egypt. We watched what became known as the Battle of the Camel on the news. We watched Mubarek clinging on to power. Things seemed to be in a stalemate, but the violence was lessening and things seemed to be calming down a bit.
We learned that the school was going to reopen on the 6th and flights were running again back to Egypt so we booked flights to get us back to Alexandria. The day we flew home we landed to the surprising news that Mubarek had resigned and handed power to the army. The protests continued and are still continuing periodically. There is still some unrest but things are mostly peaceful now. A referendum on a new constitution passed peacefully and the country’s first free and fair elections are expected for September.
It’s been a difficult term to say the least, but we’re looking forward to a well deserved Easter break and what I’m sure will be a much better summer term. My hope now is that the Egyptian people get the government that they want and deserve and that they can enjoy the freedoms that in the UK we all take for granted. I’m only sorry that people had to die before it happened.
