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He’s sitting with a guy in an FBI T-shirt who works as a driving instructor and says that, when the Arab Spring first started, he longed to be back in Cairo. “A lot of people who never had freedom and are badly uneducated are suddenly let go, and you can guess what happens next,” says Bules, who likes to come to the café for a smoke and a taste of home - where his grandparents still live.
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Today, there’s more than 83 million people, and illiteracy is hovering around 40 per cent. When Mubarak took control, the population of Egypt was 43 million people. “We had to go out on the street to protect our family because the prisoners came out of the prisons with guns,” says Bules, who recounts a vivid tale of an all-night vigil, armed with a baseball bat and a shovel, to protect his home overlooking Tahrir Square.īules says the situation in Egypt is so concerning because a huge swath of the population is entirely uneducated. Mike Bules, a 30-year-old Egyptian pharmacist who also lives in Markham, says he was in Egypt during the initial uprising and that he fought alongside his parents for his life. “In Egypt, we couldn’t live with different opinions under Mubarak, and now, finally, everything’s changed.”Įverything’s changing in Cairo, but according to two young guys I meet smoking hookahs and playing backgammon, the situation is certainly dire.
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“The important thing is that you can have an opinion, and I can have an opinion, and we can be free to disagree,” Famousi tells me.
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#Trusty scribe series#
Now the country is being ruled by the military, and there’s a weird series of elections being held in phases, and anyway, Famousi and I keep smoking, and he forgives me for not having a better understanding of Egyptian politics - it’s a newly democratic system that seems to be changing every day. I remember that it started in Tunisia and spread to Egypt, Yemen and Libya, leading to the ousting of that madman Gaddafi, but I thought Mubarak was already toppled.įrom left, Kaplan puffs on a hookah, shares a laugh with local caterer Eeid Saleh, and plays backgammon with some of his new friends We have to wait and see,” he says, and I feel a little embarrassed that I’m not better versed in the Arab Spring. “I don’t know if the new president will have real power or be under the army. “It’s black out, but everything will be clear,” prophetizes Raouf Famousi, who has lived in Markham for the past 40 years but has family back home in Egypt and spends every night at the tiny Layaly El Sharke Café on Lawrence Avenue in a neighbourhood christened “Little Cairo.” Famousi, who sits with three men beneath a small television tuned to Egyptian TV, reignites my licorice-flavoured disc of tobacco and tells me that Egypt’s future will only be revealed after the final election on June 24. I’ve got a hookah pipe the size of R2-D2 and I’m talking to a 71-year-old man, with few teeth, about the most recent incident at Tahrir Square. It’s hard to make out exactly who’s in the small Egyptian café because the smoke is so thick it feels like Snoop Dogg’s green room at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam.