As we pass the first-year anniversary of the coronation of King Charles III, we present this piece from Happy & Glorious: A Royal Celebration reflecting on the King, and some surprising adventures in Egypt. Click here for Part 3.
In 2016, I began staying with a family in a small mud-brick village in Upper Egypt, and I have seen many changes there in the years since. Besides learning about everyday life, I have visited agricultural and educational projects to assist poor communities, and later reported to both His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and His Holiness Pope Tawadros.
This led to an invitation to Clarence House, HRH Prince Charles (as His Majesty then was) being known worldwide for his active interests in community and interfaith development. The Prince of Wales later gave generous donations to two of these projects, and he has very kindly stayed in touch since. By this means the monastery of St. Pachomius (Deir El Anba Bakhom), near Luxor, was able to expand their agricultural training work and improve local nutritional standards by buying 15 more water buffalo and building a better-designed compound for the herd. Buffalo milk is creamy, nutritious, and especially beneficial to the often very poor children in the locality. Anyone who has not yet tried half-and-half tea with buffalo milk will be pleasantly surprised if they do!
Also, the monastery of the Saints (Deir El Gidiseen), near the small but ancient town of Tod, was helped with their little primary school for poor children aged 3 to 8 from the local desert areas, who otherwise would probably get little if any formal education. The much-appreciated school has been enabled to double its roll to 150 children, assisted by three local teachers and a team of volunteers, and to hire a third daily minibus to transport the children over often considerable distances from their sometimes very crumbly mud-brick homes, to which their parents have kindly welcomed me for tea. El Gidiseen’s chicken farm has also been expanded from 2,000 to 5,000 hens, and four young graduates now have new jobs there. For all this and more, thank you, Your Majesty!
Early in 2018, I had the idea of setting up a genuinely two-way partnership between this little Coptic Orthodox primary school at El Gidiseen, and a Church of England primary school in Plymouth. With cooperation from teachers, I gave several illustrated talks to the Plymouth children about Egypt, and when they were enthused about making some new friends, I composed a table-top-sized (A0) bilingual “Welcome” poster for the school to send to Egypt, together with colourful A4 “mini-posters” which individual children made. Teachers held up the “Welcome” poster in the playground, surrounded by children, and I delivered to El Gidiseen a photo of this, plus the original A0 and A4 posters. Hakim, the school carpenter, made a special billboard to display the giant poster and another billboard for the mini-posters. Both boards were proudly fixed onto the school wall, and then we had a little opening ceremony with all the children present. Everybody was very happy indeed and all of us applauded everyone else!
I also took to El Gidiseen some simple English books, as they had only one before, and brought a range of dictionaries for the teachers. In my five-day stay I gave some simple English lessons, limited by my sometimes laughable Arabic, including teaching to this Christian school a four-line round called “I Love Jesus”, sung to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” Their “combined performance” of this was later broadcast by BBC Radio. It was the first time the children had learned anything more than a few words in English, their third language after Arabic and Coptic, and as their average age was only about six, they really did very well. The Egyptian children then prepared a giant poster and mini-posters for the children in Plymouth, which are now on a display billboard, filmed by BBC television, thus completing the exchange.
In 2020 I delivered picture postcards from the Plymouth children to the little school at Tod.The friendship continues, and I visited again in 2022. I believe that children in both places will remember their “exotic friends” overseas for many years to come. One day, they may even tell their own children.
Besides BBC TV filming this, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Reconciliation Team put up a big poster about it at Lambeth Palace, as it is apparently the very first international, interdenominational primary school partnership, spanning thousands of miles, different languages and extremely different circumstances for the children involved. The Most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of the Anglican communion worldwide, took a personal interest, and I was invited to meet him at Lambeth. Just like the Primate of the Copts, I found the Primate of the Church of England to be welcoming and encouraging, and a photo of us both beaming broadly was duly taken to prove it. Even more positively, international ecumenical school partnerships like this are now being considered for replication elsewhere.
In 2018, I also stayed at the gigantic annual Festival of Saint George (Mar Girgis) in the high desert on the way to Kharga Oasis. Allegedly more than two million people come to the six-day Festival, including many Muslims (due to Saint George sometimes being identified with the mysterious Muslim figure of Al Khidr). People can meet friends from all over Egypt, and often those from overseas too. Happy Ethiopians and Sudanese sing and dance outside their tents, and Coptic services take place all day and all night. Strange white birds fly overhead and are hailed as a sign from Heaven. There are thousands of home-made tents to live in, and hundreds of temporary shops selling food, clothes and toys.
As the wind blows, the “streets” make huge clouds of dust laden with assorted bacteria and viruses, so most first-timers get ill with curious diseases, including me, despite my (years ago) surviving a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Oxford Pathology Department. Risk arises in part because there are many bullocks and rams at the festival. These are sacrificed and the meat is given to poor people. You can—and I did—step outside your tent at night and run into a great steaming bullock tied up nearby. I also turned a corner one evening to find a man carrying a complete bullock’s head, unintentionally doing a convincing impression of the fabled Minotaur. Scary!
Ritual sacrifice, reminding us of the Old Testament, and indeed of all the ancient Middle East, is just one example of many as to how time-honoured cultural tradition is still valued highly in Egypt today. Tradition links generations, providing strength and hope in the face of whatever difficulties young and old may face, which are often all too numerous. In the modern rush for the “new,” I think it is very wise not to discard this solid and helpful underpinning. It is a tap root delving into deep time, stabilising and nourishing the present and—potentially—the future too.
Perhaps the happiest times so far came just before the worldwide coronavirus pandemic put most things on temporary hold. Because learning-disabled young people in Egypt tend to have to beg on the streets, if male, or be kept at home, if female, they often and understandably feel unsettled and undervalued. In Luxor, a city of over a million people, there is very little provision for them, and, perhaps surprisingly, friends in Cairo say they are not aware of any provision at all in that megacity of over 20 million people. There is provision, in fact, but it is not nearly enough.
Because I know some of these learning-disabled young people and their often needy families, in 2019 a new thought occurred to me, which Egyptian friends enthusiastically called “fikra helwa,” فكرة حلوة, “lovely idea,” immediately I raised it. So we have put this into practice by starting little “workshops” for the learning-disabled to make small, easy things together. People enjoy making these things and both they and their families are proud of what is made. I knew from my own three daughters that girls like to make elasticated bead bracelets, for example.
So I bought thousands of coloured beads, many metres of elastic thread and 500 small biodegradable plastic bags, then designed 700 specially-printed small bilingual sticky labels. His Grace Bishop Eusap, the Coptic Orthodox Bishop of Luxor, graciously met me, discussed the project and warmly endorsed it. Workshop groups now meet in church premises every Saturday evening, subject to COVID-19 precautions. There were, immediately, huge smiles all round at our first session, and not just at my crazy-foreigner demonstration of “how to do it.” We have deaf, dumb, deaf-and-dumb, Down’s, anencephalic and other disabilities represented. Most attendees are Christian, but there are some Muslims too. Everyone is always very, very happy to meet their friends and to do something productive.
Smiles became even bigger when the Hilton Hotel at the world-famous Karnak Temple agreed to display the bracelets in a shop in their beautiful marble-paved lobby, for sale to tourists at low cost, with a percentage being returned to encourage the young people who make them. Bracelets are displayed complete in their biodegradable see-through bags with colourful bilingual فكرة حلوة / lovely idea labels. Amazingly, the Hilton is charging no commission at all for helping us. This generous initiative may well be a world first, and is certainly very welcome support for a cause which we believe will be a continuing beacon of hope in the even more difficult conditions of the post-coronavirus, post-Ukraine-invasion world. Word is spreading about this initiative too, to Cairo and elsewhere.
In late 2021, was delighted and honoured to be invited to work as a voluntary advisor to the Egyptian Ministry of Health’s General Authority of Healthcare (GAH), and especially their Research Hub. The GAH is the health services public provider under the new Universal Health Insurance system (UHI). Established in 2018, GAH currently runs over 25 hospitals and 150 primary care units and centres in 3 governorates (Port Said, Ismailia, and Luxor); and it is expected to run all the public health facilities across Egypt by 2030, as the UHI expands to provide high-quality services to all Egyptians. I visited Luxor in December and January 2022 to see my many friends there, and also to visit some GAH facilities to make a beginning on this further collaboration, which is progressing slowly. There were also discussions about a much-needed substance-abuse rehabilitation centre covering all of Upper Egypt, and possible international University links, which will depend upon extremely hard-to-get permission from various Egyptian Ministries.
In my experiences over the past 10 years comparing life in England with that in Egypt, I have many times thought back to what Dave Tomlinson wrote in his provocative book How to be a Bad Christian: “Many rich and famous people leave this world friendless, miserable and frustrated, while others who possess very little depart in peace, surrounded by friends and loved ones, knowing that their lives have had significance.”
I believe His Majesty King Charles III, thinker, philanthropist and internationalist, will not leave this world friendless, as someone having lived a life without significance. Quite the opposite. Even those little children in Egypt can tell you so. So I say with feeling, joining many millions across the whole world, God Save The King.
David Salter, MA MSc DPhil(Oxon) FRSB FInstP FRAI etc., Honorary full Professor, University of Plymouth, England.