keep on rockin' in the free zone

by joseph d. vess

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One of the beauties of living in the Third World is that governments here spend an inordinately large amount of time pandering to rich foreigners and/or capitalists. As a (comparatively) rich foreigner, I am of course privileged to experience this on a small scale, but as an IT journalist in a country where a whopping 1/66th of the population even uses a computer on a regular basis, I get to report about this on a large scale as well.

One excellent example is the Nasr City Free Zone, located in the northeast corner of Cairo known as "Nasr City." The free zone is a place where the Egyptian government allows companies to pay lower taxes and tariffs in exchange for giving high-paying jobs to already rich people, and giving low-paying jobs to poor people who could be making about the same anywhere else. This is called, strangely enough, "development."

My first trip to the free zone was a recent expedition under the auspices of His Eminence (actual title) Dr. (he's not actually a doctor though) Ahmed Nazif, Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

Ministry trips tend to be surprisingly interesting, though not because of whatever thing we happen to be going to see. For me they're instructive mainly as a cultural snapshot of mundane Egyptian life that most people don't see.

Take for instance, the Cairo IT journalists, a number of whom I've gotten to know fairly well in the many Ministry functions I've attended. They're all quite nice, though a bit strange. Such as when we were riding the Ministry bus back from the provincial capital of Zagazig at about 9 p.m., cruising through the desert of the northeast delta, and three of them started wrestling, though good-naturedly, over the final bottle of Pepsi and proceeded to spray it over nearly everyone in the bus. Most of the actual trip consists of this, and occasional conversations with me which usually end abruptly when my Arabic vocabulary has been exhausted.

In the role of the authority figure on these trips, the firm (not really) but fair Ahmed, one of the ministry's media relations staff who, by dint of his only being the number two in the office gets to ride the bus with us rather than in Dr. Ahmed's black Mercedes. His role usually consists of making sure nothing goes seriously wrong on the bus, looking bemused, and making sure I don't get lost in some remote corner of Egypt.

So on the day before Christmas I dutifully turned up at the ministry's office at the appointed hour, and climbed onto the bus where I was greeted by my friend Ashraf's wide smile and "Hello Mr. Bush!" He found this terribly amusing. They proceeded to refer to me as "Mr. Bush" for the remainder of the trip. I wasn't particularly impressed, and tried to dissuade them by explaining that "haddamr amrika," but to no avail.

Fortunately we were soon in Nasr City, at the headquarters of Egyptian software giant Sakhr. Their offices are located in a number of adobe-looking buildings, covered in vines, perched on the west end of the Free Zone and located strategically next to a picturesque mountain range of garbage. The occasion was the launch of the much vaunted Juhaina (not to be confused with the yogurt-drink of the same name) Arabic-language search engine, which has actually been launched some six weeks earlier, and may or may not work (it didn't the last time I tried it).

As with most functions of a similar nature, we turned up approximately 30 minutes late, which was about 45 minutes before Dr. Ahmed joined us. Following him inside like a flock of seagulls after a fishing boat, we sat an listened to the heavyweights of Egyptian IT spout platitudes about how technology and the Internet will revolutionise a country where half the population is functionally illiterate.

This was followed by my favorite part of any such excursion, the follow- Dr.-Ahmed-all-over-the-place-while-he-stands-around-nodding-thoughtfully-listening-to-executives-explain-that-the-people-at-each-computer-are-doing-data-entry portion of the tour. He¹s got the "nodding thoughtfully" thing down quite well.

At the end, 12 minutes of information having been shoehorned into a two-and-a-half-hour boredom-fest, we happily trooped back to the bus, secure in the knowledge that we would make it back to our offices at a reasonable hour. But since it was almost 3 p.m. at that point, Sakhr insisted that we simply had to stay for lunch, and were quite forceful about it. Not that the meal was bad, but it had the air of giving a dog a slice of meat after a stern beating; we would just as soon have left, and responded by sequestering ourselves in two corner tables and displaying poor manners (which was surprisingly easy).

This was topped only by the fun of the ride home when the bus driver, eager to showcase his knowledge of Cairo geography, elected to leave the highway that would have taken us directly back to the Ministry and got off somewhere in north Abassia so we could sit in dense traffic on little side streets for 30 minutes (also known as amount of time it took us to complete he entire trip out).

When three days later I was invited on a 6-hour round trip journey to Port Said to watch Dr. Ahmed open a new telephone exchange, I politely declined.

Joseph D. Vess, Medill '01, lives in Egypt.

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