Into the Mud...

Recently, I was visited by a couple of my daughter’s colleagues from university. Both of them are studying for their Master’s degree in Development. We started discussing the current situation in Egypt. Mina, one of the visitors, described the situation as “muddy, sticky and slippery”.

In my view, mud can be either good or bad, depending on what you make of it. For example, clay in skilled hands can make the loveliest ceramic. On the other hand, my wife wouldn’t thank me if I came in the house with muddy shoes.

My question to the students was: “How can we make something useful out of mud?” They accepted my challenge and immediately thought of a solution to separate the water from the dust. They thought of a machine to separate the vapour and change it into energy to produce distilled water, in order to serve the community. On the other side of the machine, the dust will come out, for people to use for other projects (bricks, mortar etc).

I then challenged them to think what sort of a machine we would need. Is it a car? A lorry? Maybe an engine? Or a generator? Or is it a battery? Vito then said: the machine is what we call a civil society. This civil society will be able to dive smoothly between the particles of dust and atoms of water at the ultra-microscopic level of the grass-root community level. With its limited resources, it will be able not only to separate the water from the dust, but also change the vapour into a dynamic action, producing distilled water to save the community.

The discussion around the situation in Egypt shouldn’t be centred on politics, but on how to utilise the social resource of 85 million citizens (over 50% of them are under 35 years old) in a most productive effective way.

My guests and I agreed that the only way forward for a country at the beginning of the 21st century is to empower the civil society organisations and to enable them to become guiding watchdogs on behalf of the dust (the people) and the water (resources).

We may come from dust ourselves, but good things can come from the mud as well.