Former Winnipegger Jim McEachern and his wife Karen are watching the unfolding crisis in Egypt with horror made personal. The news reports, the images of chaos in familiar streets and the names of the areas where protestors gather are snapshots of their former home.
In 2009, Jim McEachern left his job as director of sales and marketing at the Fairmont Winnipeg and transferred to a post with the Fairmont Nile City hotel in Cairo.
The couple spent a happy year in Egypt. They made lifelong friends, something this globe-trotting couple does wherever they live and work.
They got to know ordinary Egyptians as well as expatriates. They travelled the country by car, unfettered by a tourist's schedule. The job was demanding but McEachern says the country and its people marked them indelibly.
His Facebook photos show the pair riding on camels and beaming at the camera.
McEachern says armchair quarterbacks are trying to make sense of the explosion of protest and the continuing calls for political change. An outsider would have a difficult time understanding the nuances, he says.
"I can't say there were signs," he says, speaking from Alberta's Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, where he now works. "I think every single broadcaster has said this is a consequence of what is happening in Tunisia. I think you have to be there for awhile before you get under the layers, the way everything works.
"You only begin to understand much later as to how it really works."
As in most countries, tourists only scratch the surface of life in Egypt, he says.
"They have tourist police," he says. "They work two or three jobs and that's why you sometimes see them sleeping on the job. There are rumours they don't have bullets in their guns. But they make the tourist feel safe."
It's sometimes a false sense of security, he says. There are also police, secret police, an army and a massive fleet of palace guards. When President Hosni Mubarak travels, eight-lane roads are shut for kilometres. There's sharpshooters on roofs, armed police every 50 metres.
"You don't see it as an armed state," he says matter of factly. "There are certainly armed police."
As he watches the news McEachern says his concern is not for tourists or expatriates. It's for his Egyptian friends and co-workers. The Fairmont he worked at is in the epicentre of the unrest. A note on the hotel's website assures those abroad that visitors are safe.
"All guests and colleagues of the Fairmont Nile City are safe."
McEachern agrees foreigners don't appear to be in much danger.
"You're extremely privileged as a traveller. You can leave. Egyptians can't just leave."
The images of thousands of people begging to be allowed on planes, the reports of bribes being demanded for a seat, the efforts by foreign governments to evacuate their people are startling and brutal. But most who want to leave, will.
McEachern's last communication with Egyptian friends was a simple "stay well" message he sent before the government shut down the Internet. He still has means of gathering some information. Friends and colleagues in the United Arab Emirates (where he once worked) and in Britain have been receiving messages and rerouting them.
While the rest of the world watches to see if the protests will remain peaceful and if Mubarak will continue to cling to power, the McEacherns watch the news obsessively.
"The visuals of Cairo have been flooding back to us. That year we spent in Egypt was a huge wake-up call for us. We were changed."
Now they wait to see how Egypt will change and how that change will affect their faraway friends.
lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca
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