Less than a month after Tik Root and other Middlebury College students were evacuated from Egypt as chaos swept Alexandria, he's poised to return to the Middle East — this time, to Syria, where he'll resume his study of Arabic.
Meanwhile, he and his cohorts have maintained a communications pipeline to their friends in Alexandria and have turned it into a de facto news service that offered descriptions and analyses of the rapidly unfolding events from an Egyptian perspective. The bulletins came in the form of Facebook exchanges, telephone interviews and other contacts with Egyptian students, citizens and professors. Those initial reports are available via Google Doc.
And last week, on the eve of Mubarak's departure, the Middlebury evacuees — Otis Pitney, Amanda Labora and Root — launched a blog, "Reports from Egyptians," that opens a colorful, unique window into the new Egypt.
The goal, Root says, is to keep people informed on events in Egypt via reports from "direct sources"on the ground, featuring informed analysis of what's going on.
The dicey circumstances of Root's evacuation were detailed in a story a couple of weeks ago. Within days after his return to Middlebury, he and his fellow students were soliciting and posting firsthand accounts from Alexandria – in Egyptian voices not heard in most mainstream U.S. media coverage.
Here's an excerpt of a phone conversation that student Andrew Leber had with Radwa al-Barouni, a translator and teacher who described the street demonstrations:
I've never seen anything like it, Andrew, not in 10 years of living here. It's beyond what you could imagine. I've seen incredible, wonderful things happening. People having been coming and giving out things for free, today we had some of the garbage collectors come out and collect garbage for free. It's an amazing sense of community, it's like the government has been bringing out the worst in people for so, so, long, and this is finally bringing out the best in people. I mean, there's no sexual harassment – NOTHING! Can you imagine that? I finally feel safe walking around the people I've been afraid of for most of my life. I've been walking in a crowd of men all day, and not a single person has touched me, or grabbed me. "
Here's part of an interview with Wessam El-Meligi, chairman of the English Department at Alexandria University, where the Middlebury program had been based:
We were shot at. We stood guard in front of our homes every night, armed with make-shift weapons. Mine was a handlebar of an old bike! … . Egyptians have always been proud of their solidarity. While that might sound like empty slogans to some, it is true. We have been multi-faith and even cosmopolitan for thousands of years. Even with rising religious fundamentalism, the negative effects were on liberal Muslims more than on Christians….
"With banks closed, people were stressed out by scrambling for ATMs that were not damaged or that had any money left. Plastic money was useless. Groceries were selling out all they had. Large supermarkets were closed, The curfew was stifling. No time to get money or buy food or medicine. People were hoarding in anticipation of worsening conditions….."
Here's a prominent political scientist, Ashraf Mansour, telling Root about the Muslim Brotherhood and Israel:
We can tolerate the brotherhood politically. We must tolerate them if we want to be democratic. The Brothers must also tolerate us. They must tolerate leftists. And they are capable of this, the Brotherhood we are seeing now is very different from the one we had imagined before the revolution. The brothers will take their proportional place in the system. …
"The big fault of the Israeli state is that it made its peace treaty with one person, not the Egyptian people. The Israeli state cannot live in peace while its peace treaty is being signed by a dictator. The Israeli State cannot live in the middle of the Arab world by peace treaties between it and dictators. It is understandable that they are scared ….
"The Egyptian people do not want to go to war with the Israelis. They are peaceful, they do not want to make war with anybody…. We have been in 4 wars. We don't want war with Israel, but we want a new peace treaty with new conditions."
Root, who plans to depart for the University of Damascus in two weeks, said the blog will welcome informed analysis as it becomes available from other countries in the Arab world, such as Yemen.