Listening to Egyptians

"Tahrir Forever" has just been created to report regularly on the New Egypt as seen through the Egyptian press in Arabic. 

I have just returned from Tahrir where I spent 20 days in April listening, lecturing, communicating with all strata of Egyptian society.  I was enthralled by the post-Mubarak Egypt, home for one quarter of  the Arab people numbering more than 300 million. 

I went for dinner at the home of an Egyptian judge.  His 6 year old daughter, Lojeen, came to give me a gift.  It was an Egyptian flag!!  I asked the people on the streets of Cairo about how they felt after Mubarak's removal.  Their nearly uniform answer was, "No more fear."

I left my hotel (the Ramses Hilton, at the edge of Tahrir) to cross a side street at a little cafe for the rank and file.  The shoe-shine person came to serve me and began to talk politics.  I realized that people have found their voice in a re-birth of freedom. 

I was interviewed by two young women, one from the Egyptian magazine "October"; the other from the Kuwaiti newspaper "Al-Rai" (The Opinion).  Their questions were mostly about how we can retrieve the billions of dollars siphoned off by Mubarak and his regime to banks overseas. 

The hotel restaurant at breakfast was nearly empty, so the restaurant help would surround me to praise the January 25 Revolution, although tourism has nearly, for now, evaporated.  These impressions and the desire to support democracy propelled me to create "Tahrir Forever."