Do you love your country?
Few years ago, I was offered to give management lectures at the Sadat Academy in Cairo. I set my rules at the beginning and had to be strict until the students learned to respect time, how to ask in turns and how to listen and argue with rational thinking. The problem was not that. These students, who were trained to act decently in class, represented the epitome of chaotic behavior outside class, talking with high voices all at the same time, throwing litter on the ground, quarreling with the most vulgar vocabulary one could hear and sometimes indulging into violent fights. I observed their attitudes inside and outside class and kept asking myself: why this dichotomy?
As a matter of fact, you can see similar paradoxes all over Egypt. Egyptian homes are spotlessly clean but the streets are repulsive and dirty, people try to wear the mask of amicable behavior at work and they act as devils at home (i.e. the rates of domestic violence have accelerated terribly in the last two decades). In the streets of Cairo the sound of prayers can be heard echoing and most people are excellent in memorizing complete chapters and verses from the Holy books but the same people will take bribes, beat under the belt to gain a better position at work and spread rumors to ruin the reputation of a certain person. National media talk about more job opportunities, rise in our GDP and bright schemes for better educational system and health care, whereas it is obvious that unemployment is escalating, poverty is rampant everywhere, that more than 50% of people are illiterate – and if anyone go to be treated in a local hospital, it will be the shortest way to the other world.
I had been asking myself: Why is this happening? Why does a developing country, rich in natural resources, have to produce a population so poorly educated, so undernourished and so corrupt? Now I also had to ask myself: have I become a part of the corrupt educational organization, which fails to have a good impact on the students?
So one day, I decided to make a change. I entered my class, told my students to get a blank sheet of paper and answer this question honestly: Do you love your country? I told them that they had all the rights to write whatever they liked, that they were free to express themselves as far as they were honest to themselves.
Back in my office, I found 3 papers out of 35 stating: Yes, I love my country. Despite my shock I came to acknowledge the answer to the questions I had been asking myself: The real problem is that so many do not feel they belong in their own countries – regardless of all the slogans that propagate ethos of national unity and solidarity. Unable, for the most part, to elect real representatives – mainly due to tribal and sectarian conflicts and the mutual interests of those in power – people feel ruled over. The street, the country as a physical entity belongs to someone else.
The people are reared in the frame of corrupt policies, faked ideologies, double standards. And those who are supposed to be the “good examples” – those who work within the state system – also feel that their existence depend on the same corruption upon which the state itself thrives. Consequently, the people become part of corruption.
The first UNDP report, back in 2002, was deeply depressing. It identifies three cardinal obstacles to human development in the Arab world: the widening lack of 1/freedom, 2/ women’s right and 3/knowledge.
From the papers I gathered from my students, many of them were looking forward to travel to the west. And who can blame them when Cairo awash with graduates holding BAs and have to drive taxis or paint houses or work as plumbers to make a living? Indeed many do not know the meaning of belonging.
Marina Ihab Yacoub
Watani Weekly
Cairo, Egypt
