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76 8. WORLDS APART: AN EGYPTIAN VILLAGE AND THE INTERNATIONAL TOURISM INDUSTRY TIMOTHY MITCHELL Ayman wanted a job in tourism. But he did badly on his high-school language exams and spent two years at a school in Luxor, across the river from his village, struggling to master enough rudimentary English and German to get into the hotel school at Qina.His most vivid memory from his two years in Qina was the night when he and the other front-desk trainees played the role of guests in a restaurant for the final exam of the student waiters and cooks. The meal began with soup.He burned his mouth on the first spoonful and it was cleared away before it had cooled enough for him to eat it.Next was “Russian salad,”containing raw egg which made him choke on the first mouthful. Silverware was brought and taken away faster than he could figure out how to use it.The main course was veal too tough to cut with a knife but which they were not allowed to pick up with their hands. The desserts looked appealing but there were not enough to go around. The meal ended without him having eaten a thing. Back at his parents’house in the village, without a job or a future, he told and retold this story. Life was a meal you never got to eat. Ayman’s father,a guard in the Pharaonic tombs,was nearly crippled with chronic asthma caused by dust from the tombs and a cigarette addiction.His wages of 100 Egyptian pounds per month (about a $1 a day) barely covered cigarettes and medicine. Ayman’s younger brother, also out of work, carved Pharaonic stone motifs to sell to the alabaster factories, as the shops are called, on the main road where tourist buses stop. The family was supported by Ayman’s mother, who raised rabbits, chickens, sheep, and water buffalo.With the older children,she harvested sugarcane in winter for the large landowners , taking the stripped leaves for the buffalo to supplement the clover she grows on the family’s own half-acre.They were lucky still to own the land: In 1982, the World Bank drew up plans to convert their field into a parking area for tour buses.Fortunately,when the government implemented the plans it spared the field, although several other households lost land to tourist industry expansion. Outside Development Ayman’s difficulty in finding a tourism job was linked partly to the activities of jihadist groups,veterans of the US-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan who had returned home and launched a terror campaign in southern Egypt aimed at tourist sites. A series of attacks in the mid-1990s culminated in a massacre in November 1997 at a tourist site near Ayman’s 77 EGYPT | WORLDS APART: AN EGYPTIAN VILLAGE AND THE INTERNATIONAL TOURISM INDUSTRY village in which fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians died. Prior to that attack, Luxor’s local religious leaders, popular sentiment, and a pervasive secret police had created a safe haven for sightseeing. But tourists had stayed away, nonetheless, and hotel and tour operators responded by laying off unskilled workers—the easiest part of their budget to cut. By the mid-1990s, tourists were slowly returning to Egypt, but difficulties continued.1 For one thing, tourism was a volatile industry. Before the jihadists there was an earthquake; before the earthquake there was the Gulf war; and before that the fire at the Heliopolis Sheraton, stretching back through the 1980s. But even if there had been no more riots, earthquakes,killings,fires or wars,Ayman and others like him would still have found it hard, to benefit from the industry that surrounded them and affected far more than the relative few it employed. Ayman’s hamlet is one of about twenty communities opposite Luxor on the west bank of the Nile, where the majority of Luxor’s archaeological sites are located. Government decrees of 1976 and 1981 prohibited the building of hotels and other enterprises on the west bank, to preserve the touristic quality of the villages and Pharaonic sites. Building of any sort had to be mud brick and was severely restricted.No new commercial or workshop licenses were issued.2 Developing Luxor tourism required the “de-development” of these villages. The 1982 World Bank program, drawn up by the US consulting firm Arthur D. Little, suggested one or two remedies to these problems: a cooperative to...

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