Driving over one of the longest and most crowded bridges in Cairo, Egypt, your eye repeatedly spots red and white signs saying “An Egyptian Stand”, showing a number of images representing public service/food/drink/comfort etc.

The campaign calls on the Egyptian population to take a stand, and wise up, if we wise up, we can all drink, we can all eat, we can all get health care, we’ll all find a place to sit in the subway.

Now these signs are everywhere, literally, showing clean bus seats, shiny school desks, sparkling clean water! Your brain starts this subconscious thinking process of what exactly are they trying to do?
Are they trying to tell people to start family planning? Are they encouraging contraceptives? Are they warning that we’re starting to run out of resources?

Are they kidding me?!!! urm..too little too late? OK honestly, I remember in 2006, presenting to a panel of judges in Paris the population of Egypt...72 Million...
2 Years later, giving the same statistics, only in New York this time, the number read 80 Million! Technically, that’s not so bad, you’re looking at an average of one child for 10 million families.

But remember that you’re also looking at a religious country, that holds on tightly to tradition and culture, and the wealth that is children. You’re looking at a country that has been constantly reproducing without thought as to scarcity of resources or congestion of LIFE basically!
You’re dealing with a good majority of people who believe that any sort of family planning is blasphemous, and that god forbid, you should prevent birth in any fashion, planned or unplanned!

Then you think about the system behind such a campaign, why the hell are you advertising this in places like Heliopolis or Zamalek, basically in high end places, where the higher income-making families live, where the elite of the Egyptians, and most of the foreigners stay.

Instead of admiring the campaign, or the thought behind it, I can’t help but feel sick. You start seeing beyond the surface. Is this just another theft method? Is it just another way of showing the international community that hey! we’re tackling over population!
Is it a way to show the people themselves that the system cares? Do they really care in the first place? Will our subways ever look this clean? Even if we stop reproducing altogether?

Anyway, that was never my point. I just keep wondering, what are you thinking? Wrong target, wrong medium, wrong method, wrong timing, wrong effort. I start feeling out of breath, and all I want to do is fling my arms to the side and just give up trying to explain that this is just so not enough. Then you feel worse because, well, they already know that.

It is not an Egyptian stand, it’s an Egyptian reformatting of all our concepts, traditions, beliefs. You need to reshape an entire society and what its based upon. It requires a different educational system to start with, different television for sure! Different religious figures that educate people religiously that what is truly against any God is that you bare children just to strip them off their right to a good comfortable life.

I’m not sure where will we go next. Walking the roads of Cairo, you feel like we’re running out of space, space to stand, breathe, walk, drive. Running out of room, and spilling over on the sides. Falling off the bridges and stumbling off the side walks.
Actually scratch that, we stopped using the side walk altogether.

An Egyptian Stand...to stop, and look at how ridiculous you’re sounding!