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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
By Tarek El-Tablawy May 23, 2014 7:05 AM ET
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Photographer: Mohamed El-Shahed/AFP via Getty Images
Supporter of former army chief and leading presidential candidate Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi... Read More
Amira isn’t her real name, though neither is the father on her daughter’s birth certificate.
The real man is a client of the Cairo prostitute, who used to sell clothes and then resorted to selling herself. He paid 600 Egyptian pounds ($84) for two hours of pleasure about a year ago after Amira’s life had taken another turn for the worse.
“I hope your life is better than mine,” she recalls whispering to the infant, her second child, as they left the hospital following a birth overseen by bribed medical staff.
While every country has tales of hardship and desperation, Amira, 29, encapsulates the disappointment of her countrymen whose lives instead went further into decline after the euphoria of Egypt’s revolution had captivated the world.
At the start of 2011, as demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square were hastening the departure of President Hosni Mubarakafter almost 30 years, she had a job as a store clerk and her elder child, a life she lost as sales collapsed following the uprising. Then came Mohamed Mursi and a more Islamist government, before a coup got rid of him in July last year.
Related:
Photographer: Mahmoud Khaled/AFP via Getty Images
Egyptian women next to defaced campaign posters of Egypt's Hamdeen Sabbahi, the sole...Read More
Next President
Aspirations now lie with Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the former army chief who led Mursi’s overthrow and whose only rival in a presidential election next week is leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi. El-Sisi is expected to win and inherit a nation many Egyptians say can’t cope with another false dawn.
Three years after Egypt became the poster child for the Arab Spring uprisings that had started in Tunisia the year before, tens of millions of the country’s 85 million people have seen little change in terms of the poverty, corruption and inertia that festered under Mubarak.
Amira, who asked not to be identified by her real name because of her illicit trade, remembers the optimism as she watched with her now four-year-old son.
“You saw all those people in Tahrir and it was impossible not to believe it would bring the change we wanted,” said Amira, speaking in her fifth-floor apartment while nursing her three-month-old daughter, Haneen Hisham, through a mild fever as she lay on a mattress on the floor next to her. “I was alone, with a child, but I still had hope.”
Photographer: Ed Giles/Getty Images
A woman cleans the grounds of the Muhammad Ali Mosque in Cairo. Three years after Egypt...Read More
‘Big Battle’
Amira, a slender woman dressed in skin-tight jeans and with light make-up, sees El-Sisi as a last chance, the man to help bring her back from the life she was thrust into. A poster of him in customary military garb is on the wall.
In his election campaign, El-Sisi declared he is ready for “this big battle, the battle of fighting terrorism, the battle of building, eliminating poverty and diseases and establishing a modern country.”
His success will hinge on the government’s ability as much to create jobs, while the budget deficit hit almost 14 percent of economic output in the last financial year. To do that, reforms on key entitlements such as subsidies on food and energy will be a painful necessity, officials have said.
Egypt’s Savior?
The unrest that brewed in the months after Mubarak’s ouster hit the economy and people like Amira hard.
Foreign investors dumped almost all of their 59 billion pounds of government debt since the start of the unrest in 2011, according to central bank data. Foreign reserves are around 50 percent of their December 2010 levels and the stalled economy has bred a wave of protests and street crime feeding off the absence of police on the streets.
“People revolted because there was some sort of a political alternative for them,” said Ashraf El-Sherif, a political science lecturer at the American University in Cairo. “This time people know there’s no alternative.”
Amira’s slide into vice and the birth of Haneen are an extreme snapshot of what the next president faces.
She lost her job as sales plunged in the clothing shop where she worked. When her son fell ill, the week-long stay in a state hospital where cats hunted for scraps left her broke.
Her first client as a prostitute came roughly three months after Amira’s divorce, which followed Mubarak’s February 2011 ouster by two months. She said she walked out on her then-husband after she caught him in bed with her best friend.
Rock Bottom
“I knew I’d hit the bottom,” said Amira, who makes in an hour what she got paid in a month at the store. “It’s the money you hope will pull you back up.”
With medical bills mounting and tourists who pay for prostitutes in dollars or Saudi riyals steering clear, Amira began to sell her furniture in early 2012. First to go was the sofa set for 1,200 pounds.
At that time, a new path out of the growing chaos gripping Egypt was emerging in the form of the election of Mursi. His pledges to be a “president for all Egyptians” were dismissed by secularists, activists and others who found little comfort in what he claimed were accomplishments such as stemming price increases in mangoes. Other food costs were climbing.
“I needed a job, not fruit,” said Amira. “I needed a way out of this life so that I could live like a human being and raise my son properly.”
As clashes between secularists and Islamists spread, protests became angrier, and the corpses piled up. Mursi stressed his legitimacy as the country’s first freely elected civilian president. The Egyptian pound lost 8.4 percent in 2013, the most in a decade, and Amira sunk deeper each day into a life she never thought she’d live.
Mursi Coup
They fought for power and “supposedly for our revolution, but we, the people who live miserable lives, were forgotten,” she said. “Nothing had changed. It’s still a country where everyone has to fend for themselves.”
Mursi’s July 2013 ouster by the military after a mass protest days earlier rekindled hope for some Egyptians, including Amira. It also led to the bloodiest period in the country’s recent history. Security forces killed 10 militants in Sinai over the past 48 hours, the state-run Ahram Gate reported today.
Instead of the portly, bearded U.S. trained engineer-turned-president, El-Sisi arrived in a pressed military uniform and calm demeanor. He exuded confidence, Amira said. The military crackdown on the Brotherhood, though, left hundreds of Mursi supporters dead and thousands more put on trial, including the former president.
Unluckily for Amira, the authorities also started trying to clean up the streets of illegal activities.
With little hiring in the stores where she had once worked, she sold her kitchen cabinets. Then, as her pregnancy got tougher, next went the bed. Still tired after the birth three months ago, Amira looks at her daughter and son on mattresses and then up at the poster of El-Sisi.
“Don’t deceive us,” she said.
Cairo Prostitute’s Tale Charts Egyptian Slide to Desperation - Bloomberg
9 Comments Email Print
Save
Photographer: Mohamed El-Shahed/AFP via Getty Images
Supporter of former army chief and leading presidential candidate Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi... Read More
Amira isn’t her real name, though neither is the father on her daughter’s birth certificate.
The real man is a client of the Cairo prostitute, who used to sell clothes and then resorted to selling herself. He paid 600 Egyptian pounds ($84) for two hours of pleasure about a year ago after Amira’s life had taken another turn for the worse.
“I hope your life is better than mine,” she recalls whispering to the infant, her second child, as they left the hospital following a birth overseen by bribed medical staff.
While every country has tales of hardship and desperation, Amira, 29, encapsulates the disappointment of her countrymen whose lives instead went further into decline after the euphoria of Egypt’s revolution had captivated the world.
At the start of 2011, as demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square were hastening the departure of President Hosni Mubarakafter almost 30 years, she had a job as a store clerk and her elder child, a life she lost as sales collapsed following the uprising. Then came Mohamed Mursi and a more Islamist government, before a coup got rid of him in July last year.
Related:
- U.S. Caught Between Ideals and Interests as Egypt Votes
- Israeli Arabs Defend Property From Vandals Ahead of Pope Visit
Photographer: Mahmoud Khaled/AFP via Getty Images
Egyptian women next to defaced campaign posters of Egypt's Hamdeen Sabbahi, the sole...Read More
Next President
Aspirations now lie with Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the former army chief who led Mursi’s overthrow and whose only rival in a presidential election next week is leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi. El-Sisi is expected to win and inherit a nation many Egyptians say can’t cope with another false dawn.
Three years after Egypt became the poster child for the Arab Spring uprisings that had started in Tunisia the year before, tens of millions of the country’s 85 million people have seen little change in terms of the poverty, corruption and inertia that festered under Mubarak.
Amira, who asked not to be identified by her real name because of her illicit trade, remembers the optimism as she watched with her now four-year-old son.
“You saw all those people in Tahrir and it was impossible not to believe it would bring the change we wanted,” said Amira, speaking in her fifth-floor apartment while nursing her three-month-old daughter, Haneen Hisham, through a mild fever as she lay on a mattress on the floor next to her. “I was alone, with a child, but I still had hope.”
Photographer: Ed Giles/Getty Images
A woman cleans the grounds of the Muhammad Ali Mosque in Cairo. Three years after Egypt...Read More
‘Big Battle’
Amira, a slender woman dressed in skin-tight jeans and with light make-up, sees El-Sisi as a last chance, the man to help bring her back from the life she was thrust into. A poster of him in customary military garb is on the wall.
In his election campaign, El-Sisi declared he is ready for “this big battle, the battle of fighting terrorism, the battle of building, eliminating poverty and diseases and establishing a modern country.”
His success will hinge on the government’s ability as much to create jobs, while the budget deficit hit almost 14 percent of economic output in the last financial year. To do that, reforms on key entitlements such as subsidies on food and energy will be a painful necessity, officials have said.
Egypt’s Savior?
The unrest that brewed in the months after Mubarak’s ouster hit the economy and people like Amira hard.
Foreign investors dumped almost all of their 59 billion pounds of government debt since the start of the unrest in 2011, according to central bank data. Foreign reserves are around 50 percent of their December 2010 levels and the stalled economy has bred a wave of protests and street crime feeding off the absence of police on the streets.
“People revolted because there was some sort of a political alternative for them,” said Ashraf El-Sherif, a political science lecturer at the American University in Cairo. “This time people know there’s no alternative.”
Amira’s slide into vice and the birth of Haneen are an extreme snapshot of what the next president faces.
She lost her job as sales plunged in the clothing shop where she worked. When her son fell ill, the week-long stay in a state hospital where cats hunted for scraps left her broke.
Her first client as a prostitute came roughly three months after Amira’s divorce, which followed Mubarak’s February 2011 ouster by two months. She said she walked out on her then-husband after she caught him in bed with her best friend.
Rock Bottom
“I knew I’d hit the bottom,” said Amira, who makes in an hour what she got paid in a month at the store. “It’s the money you hope will pull you back up.”
With medical bills mounting and tourists who pay for prostitutes in dollars or Saudi riyals steering clear, Amira began to sell her furniture in early 2012. First to go was the sofa set for 1,200 pounds.
At that time, a new path out of the growing chaos gripping Egypt was emerging in the form of the election of Mursi. His pledges to be a “president for all Egyptians” were dismissed by secularists, activists and others who found little comfort in what he claimed were accomplishments such as stemming price increases in mangoes. Other food costs were climbing.
“I needed a job, not fruit,” said Amira. “I needed a way out of this life so that I could live like a human being and raise my son properly.”
As clashes between secularists and Islamists spread, protests became angrier, and the corpses piled up. Mursi stressed his legitimacy as the country’s first freely elected civilian president. The Egyptian pound lost 8.4 percent in 2013, the most in a decade, and Amira sunk deeper each day into a life she never thought she’d live.
Mursi Coup
They fought for power and “supposedly for our revolution, but we, the people who live miserable lives, were forgotten,” she said. “Nothing had changed. It’s still a country where everyone has to fend for themselves.”
Mursi’s July 2013 ouster by the military after a mass protest days earlier rekindled hope for some Egyptians, including Amira. It also led to the bloodiest period in the country’s recent history. Security forces killed 10 militants in Sinai over the past 48 hours, the state-run Ahram Gate reported today.
Instead of the portly, bearded U.S. trained engineer-turned-president, El-Sisi arrived in a pressed military uniform and calm demeanor. He exuded confidence, Amira said. The military crackdown on the Brotherhood, though, left hundreds of Mursi supporters dead and thousands more put on trial, including the former president.
Unluckily for Amira, the authorities also started trying to clean up the streets of illegal activities.
With little hiring in the stores where she had once worked, she sold her kitchen cabinets. Then, as her pregnancy got tougher, next went the bed. Still tired after the birth three months ago, Amira looks at her daughter and son on mattresses and then up at the poster of El-Sisi.
“Don’t deceive us,” she said.
Cairo Prostitute’s Tale Charts Egyptian Slide to Desperation - Bloomberg
