
What it's like in Egypt: An email from my mom - zefhous
I just received this email from my mom who has been visiting my sister in Cairo. Some background: My sister Noelle lives there and teaches at the American University of Cairo. She is married to John, an Egyptian man. My father is Lebanese and my parents lived in Lebanon during much of their civil war before I was born.<p>Here's a lightly edited version of what she wrote:<p>Dear Friends,<p>There is still no internet here in Cairo as I write. The servers and the internet have been turned off, but I have decided to get my email ready so that I can send them when there is access again. The mobile phone system has been turned on again, according to Noelle who called hers from her land line. But it’s so busy that it’s almost impossible to call anyone yet, and the internet has not come on all of today.<p>It will be interesting to see who has written to check that I am still alive, and yes, I am still alive. As I asked before, please pray for the poor people here. They live on almost nothing, and my heart goes out to the parents who have nothing to feed their children. The poverty and suffering is so difficult, and the rage of the people is true. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are so unable to find jobs and ways to care for their families.<p>With my BA in Biblical Archaeology, I have been tempted to go to the National Museum of Cairo and stand guard with other Egyptian citizens, but what could I do with my cane as a weapon? We have seen photos of glass cabinets broken into and now empty in the museum, and it saddens me that a few foolish people would steal the gold and some of the amazing antiquities from the pharaoh’s times, an incredible treasure of Egypt.<p>On Friday, Noelle’s husband and my son-in-law, John, with his friend, were out for many hours in the vast crowds, photographing, dodging water cannons but still very wet from them and suffering from all the tear gas in the air. He and his Belgian friend, David, a houseguest who is planning to move here, went out together to observe and report on the events. David, who left for Brussels, going to the airport on Saturday morning as soon as the curfew lifted at 7 AM, said that the gas was terrible and miserable.<p>John wrote a news story for his Arabic newspaper which is both an online and in a printed paper. And he brought us home a tear gas canister so that we could see “the gifts that America sends to Egypt”. It was made on Kinsman Road in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, 16134. Manufactured in 2003, it is three years beyond its expiration date, but John said that it still worked very well. I rubbed my eye after I handled the canister, and I am regretting it now. It’s a few feet from me, but I can smell it from here. We are putting it into a clear plastic bag as a reminder of yesterday. Done.<p>People and families of those who have been injured, over 1000, and killed, over 150, like the young woman hit in the head with a tear gas canister while she stood agreeing and shouting from a bridge that Mubarak must be deposed, need so much prayer and care. John and David gave their scarves to men who were bleeding, and they called us on the land line from the newspaper office to ask for first aid advice. People were helping each other, but only some went to hospitals. But there was a shortage of fire trucks to quell the fires or ambulances to help the wounded.<p>Last night the citizens set up check points to search vehicles that were heading into areas where there were still riots. An ambulance that civilians searched had weapons and bullets in it going to the security forces. The people went crazy and took these weapons away from being supplied to the police who were going to use them on the people. Still, John said that people brought to the newspaper office both large and small bullets that had been removed from people or found on the street. So the police started out using rubber bullets which can wound and some times kill, and later used real bullets that can easily kill the citizens.<p>People here usually do not have weapons. This is not true in Lebanon. Last week I saw a hand gun, a rifle, and a semi-automatic machine gun at a neighbor’s home. He was happy and proud of them and felt they helped him keep his family safe and protected. John describes the police here as being brutal and inhumane and the jails as frightening places where torture is common and terrible.<p>Last night, the army was shooting multiple rounds into late in the evening, and I woke up this morning to that sound. With the curfew, people are protecting their own property, which is a good use of their time, since the police are not in evidence, and they have taken responsibility for chasing them off the streets. Some friends came over, I made a soup, and we prayed together for Egypt, and we watched TV for a while. Then we played RISK. We didn’t finish the game until 2 AM, and I, having won and lost the USA and won Europe, was the winner at RISK. How fun was that!<p>Personally, on Friday, I hobbled three blocks to the vegetable and fruit market and bought some fresh produce. Red cabbage, dirty potatoes, small zucchini, sweet potatoes, red peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, oranges and bananas. They usually wash their salad items in vinegar, but most of the vinegar had been taken by John and his friend to fight the worst effects of the tear-gas, so I boiled tomatoes to pop the skins off and peeled the other items.<p>I found and bought a good fresh crunchy romaine lettuce, and I am going to find more vinegar today so we can eat a salad, I hope. I found a sweet little village farm lady on the side of the road with a basket of greens, so she sold me the lettuce and some green onions. She wanted 65 cents. I paid her $1 because I wouldn’t ask her for change! Usually you cannot find anything that was just picked that day, so this was a bonus for my having hobbled out to shop. [...]<p>I will include a photo of the scene, but I am hoping to turn out an impressionist painting of the scene of Tahrir Square with tens of thousands of protestors in it in front of a huge government building at night. The largest protestant church in Egypt, Kassar Debara, is hidden behind it. Of Egypt’s 80 million people, 10% are Christians. Some Muslims have been guarding Coptic churches while Christians pray, and on Friday, Christians were guarding the mosques while Muslims prayed.<p>[...]<p>Hearing the gun shots late into the night (as the army is firing into the air to keep looters away) has reminded me of the war years Georges and I spent with André and Noelle in Lebanon. We always slept in the most hidden bedroom, and we kept the children with us so they wouldn’t be afraid. One evening, our apartment parking area near the stairs had a car that blew up because someone had wired a bomb to it. We had been at a party playing RISK, and we were fifteen minutes late getting André home for his bed time. We heard the loud blast of the car bomb as we were leaving, but only knew it was our building when we arrived home and all the doors had been shattered open. If we had been on time, we and our ears would have been finished. Georges spent the whole night with his drill and common sense repairing people’s doors so they could lock themselves in their apartments.<p>John's mother and brother, Nadia and David, are staying with us for several days now that the other David has gone home. It's too far to come for a visit during the curfew and then to go home by the subway, over an hour away. David, an architect, has a terrible and painful sickness, familial mediterranean fever. Different ethnic groups have this, Armenians, Jews, and Egyptians. What a difficult and painful sickness it is. The mothers get to share a bedroom. You can read about it on Wikipedia, but, of course, I cannot. I don't have access to the internet. Another teacher also stayed with us last night to understand the news and watch some TV stations here.<p>Now that we finally have had the internet turned back on, I shall look forward to reading your emails! I am flying out on Friday or Saturday, depending on when Lufthansa finds a space for me. [...] I am asking God to help me find a way to the airport. Gas stations have been rather closed. I hope to see and talk with many friends next week! Please pray for the helpless and hopeless in Egypt.
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elliottcarlson
"Of Egypt’s 80 million people, 10% are Christians. Some Muslims have been
guarding Coptic churches while Christians pray, and on Friday, Christians were
guarding the mosques while Muslims prayed."

This.

I hate it when people use that - but if anything deserves it, it is "This."

~~~
baltcode
I might be a little slow, but I didn't understand. What is "this"? What do you
hate people using? Prayer, Islam, Christianity, or people professing religious
harmony for maybe sorta political ends?

~~~
allenp
Using the word "this" after a quote is kind of internet short-hand for saying
"this is super significant and bigger than any individual."

He said "this" but then said he doesn't like using it but had to in this case
because it just fit. I think this usage may have come from Reddit?

~~~
jacobolus
Wherever it comes from, it’s one of the most obnoxious comment patterns on the
internet, and I’d be extremely disappointed to start seeing it here. If
something is worth quoting without further comment, a naked quotation is
perfectly sufficient. If it needs special emphasis, how about just a simple
“!” at the end.

Writing “this.” as a comment and then adding an apologetic explanation
afterward is even worse, if that’s possible. If you need to write a sentence
about the importance of something, how about writing something relevant
instead of driving the conversation onto a tangent about commenting style.

* * *

Edit, since apparently this was unclear: it _is_ obnoxious, _to me_ (implied
in my statement, though I’d guess it’s obnoxious to plenty of others as well).
The danger with hackneyed phrases† and metaphors generally is that they
encourage a lazy discussion style that decreases the signal-to-noise ratio. It
is my personal experience that communities where usages like “this.” are
popular are, on the whole, less relevant and interesting than ones where they
aren’t. I don’t want people to start pulling quotations from linked articles
as their entire comments, even if it might sometimes be appropriate, because
when such comments are encouraged, the trend is toward banality and
repetition.

† a hackneyed phrase itself. hah.

~~~
gruseom
It's not obnoxious; it's an idiom, or a potential idiom, that wouldn't have
caught on if it didn't fill a niche. Your suggested alternatives aren't the
same thing at all. A naked quotation doesn't communicate what the quoter is
feeling; you can't stick "!" at the end of a quote without changing it; and a
free-floating "!" would be still more nonstandard and harder to read than
"This."

It's just language evolution at work.

~~~
vacri
I'm tired of hearing about the degradation of language content - the 'race to
the bottom' of simplified language - being defended as 'just what language
does'. Why can't people be proactive about the language they want to use?

What's wrong with someone discussing why they think it's poor, and providing
motivation to a 'this'-er to see why it's poor and changing their behaviour
towards a more informative approach?

Particularly in an intellectual environment such as what HN wants to fill, why
is it wrong to say 'please don't dumb down conversation, please inject
content'? After all, screaming 'first post' and trolling are also natural
social progressions, but they're frowned on too.

~~~
gruseom
You misunderstand how language changes. New forms always start out as
incorrect. Incorrect usages that catch on eventually become correct usages. If
everyone stuck to "good" usage, language would stay frozen, which would be a
disaster for us humans. Fortunately, we can't control this. Language, as
Heidegger said, is the master of man, not the other way around.

Educated people often perceive themselves as defending proper English or
whatever against the uncouth hordes. One can see this in the arts, where the
same people usually want to perpetuate classical forms. But once a form
becomes classical it rarely produces much of lasting worth. Today's classical
forms were yesterday's popular (or culturally marginal) forms, while
yesterday's classical forms are mostly forgotten today. There are exceptions,
of course, but this rule is remarkably stable. It took centuries for
Shakespeare to be recognized as classic.

It's fun to note that this rule enables one to make some reasonable guesses.
For example, it's more likely that our science fiction, comic books, and
movies will be remembered centuries from now than it is that our literary
novels will be. (Remember that the novel itself, at the time that the great
European novels were being written, was regarded as a guilty pleasure - the
way we regard, say, TV. _Proper_ writers wrote drama in verse.) Ditto for rock
and roll and hip-hop over orchestral music. And so on.

Once you see that railing against new linguistic forms is just one of those
get-off-my-lawn complaints that are forever with us, much as the old always
say that the young are ruining civilization, you become free to enjoy how
things change. Real intellectual culture is closely connected to the marginal,
lowly, and popular; it's pseudo-intellectual culture that wants to erect a
wall against them.

~~~
vacri
Out of curiousity, if we shouldn't correct the language of those we believe
are using it poorly, how would one justify the correction of subtle hate
speech, which is about stopping language from being used to form a base
opinion about a class of people?

Is this not interfering with the way individuals choose to use language,
molding language into what we want it to be rather than letting it be what it
naturally falls to?

~~~
gruseom
Fair question. It seems to me that language isn't ever intrinsically hateful;
what's hateful is the intent with which humans sometimes use it. "Nigger"
isn't hateful when Chris Rock uses it; arguably not when Mark Twain put it in
Huck Finn either. That's one of the fascinating things about language: the
minute you try to pin it down, new usages appear that escape your grasp. Often
to comedic effect.

------
phunel
"...he brought us home a tear gas canister so that we could see “the gifts
that America sends to Egypt”. It was made on Kinsman Road in Jamestown,
Pennsylvania, 16134."

I've seen this covered all over the news and can't understand the logic.
Despite the fact that the United States has publicly backed the will of the
Egyptian people, calling for an orderly transition - there seems to be a
pathological need to throw some egg. No one is grabbing the 7.62 casings from
the Misr-AKM and saying, "see the gifts Russia sends to Egypt?"

~~~
iron_ball
It's almost as if the dictator they want to overthrow has been one of
America's closest allies in the region. Why, to hear them talk, you'd think
America has made the dictator's continued reign a linchpin of their Middle
Eastern policy.

------
jalgebra
The tear gas company referenced above, which is located in Pennsylvania::
<http://combinedsystems.com/>

~~~
patrickgzill
Just as I suspected, a search for {murtha "combined systems"} shows that this
was yet another government or military connected company which located in that
part of Pennsylvania due to Rep. Murtha's strongarming.

------
dkarl
_I will include a photo of the scene_

zefhous, do you have this photo? Can you make it available?

Amazing submission, thank you.

~~~
zefhous
Yes, sorry it's so small.

<http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/4778/protestl.jpg>

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drndown2007
Thanks for sharing that. After reading about how the Christians and Muslims
are protecting each other, I think Egytians in general must be pretty awesome
people.

~~~
adrianbye
they're just people. there's plenty of countries out there

~~~
shawnlower
Mistakenly believing that an act of humanity is a sign of that
person/group/country's ethical superiority is a tragically common, and
tragically ironic occurrence.

------
rahooligan
The US gives over a billion dollars in military aid to Egypt for strategic
reasons and also to maintain peace between Israel and Egypt. This aid is not
meant for Mubarak but it is for any government Egypt supports. So US should
continue providing such aid even if Mubarak is toppled. Hope peace is restored
soon. Thanks for posting the email. So informative.

<http://bit.ly/gxLfZj>

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prawn
For those interested, Al Jazeera's online producer Evan Hill tweets pretty
frequently with eyewitness updates on what's happening over there:

<http://twitter.com/#!/evanchill>

Things have gone up a notch in the last 24 hours or so.

------
eru
Thanks for sharing!

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Tinanot
Unfortunately all praying is waste of time...

------
mindctrl
Looks fake to me.

~~~
zefhous
What looks fake? Why would I fake it?

I'd be happy to answer questions if you are actually interested.

