What motivates me? Part two

The lady who overshadowed my talk

The idea of delivering a talk in Egypt about the role of civil society organisations in building nations and creating civilisations was discussed between myself and a few young volunteers in Cairo.

To be very honest, I was a bit scared to give a public talk where is, in fact, my birth place without having a strong logistic support from our office, as we don’t have a THF base in Cairo at the moment. Instead, we used the revolutionary technique of Social Media: we advertised the event on my Facebook page and the pages of a few local youth organisations and universities.

The feedback I received from some of my relatives and colleagues when they heard of this Facebook idea was that they believed only 10% people who signed up would attend. We were prepared for disaster. On the day, to my surprise, we found the hall full of people; the organisers had to bring in more chairs to fill the corridors and open the second hall.

The source of my motivation and the power behind my drive is not the number of people who attended the talk for 2 hours, but the actual age of the people. I was pleased to see that more than 80% of them were under 30 and their interaction was positive, lively, dynamic and forward looking towards long-term sustainable solution.

I was even more impressed by a comment made by a retired professor who used to teach French at “Ain Schams” university. She was over 80 and could hardly speak, but managed to deliver a message of motivation. She told us how she contributed towards helping the poor people through giving time, effort, vision, cash. When she used to feel she became too big-headed- for her own good, she used to volunteer for the first aid and ambulance services and go and clean up the wounds and feet of ordinary people.

To be continued...