Now there is a picture I recognise, the picture from Bayad of men laying a pipe in the desert! I might even have taken the picture, but I don't know for sure. The man second from the bottom who is bending over is Abdul Hamid, who was the closest thing to the leader of the Bayad project from the village, and an amazing Spirit Man. The man above him was Shacker, one of our more enigmatic village workers, but in his own way a very hard worker. I recognise the next man up but I can't remember his name.

I went to Cairo with Abdul Hamid many times, sometimes to buy things, and sometimes to raise money. I remember how scandalized our landlord in Cairo was when we brought in a village man to the house we were renting. There was a huge cultural distance between the middle class in Cairo and villagers. This reminds me of the book Villages by Richard Critchfield. One of his theses was that people from villages all around the world have more in common with each other than they do with the educated middle class in their own country. We didn't understand this at all, with the result that our effort to have local folks like Abdul Hamid empowered to be leaders faced an immovable obstacle in the local government.. We found that our young Egyptian staff members faced a similar lack of respect.

That was really quite an amazing time in Bayad! And I am deeply grateful for the time I had working with Adbul Hamid, one of the most remarkable people I have known.

Tim Wegner