Eldefrawy is her family name and Elmasry her husband's. As an author in Egypt, she is known as Eldefrawy Elmasry -- a way of avoiding gender prejudice as a woman. A veteran of the research departments of several pharmaceutical multinationals, her interest in child health and motherhood brought her in close contact with Maggy Daley, the wife of the mayor of Chicago and one of the field's best-known activists. For many years she was based in the US, where she pursued her pharmaceutical research; these days it is on "childhood and motherhood" -- "a worthy cause that Egypt needs more than ever now" -- that she devotes her efforts back home. It was as a fresh graduate of the Faculty of Pharmacy, Cairo University, that she first went to the States on a PhD fellowship in 1958. She married three years later, while her fiancé, who would soon join her, was studying in Russia. Her life away from home and the support of a loving extended family taught her self-organisation and time management. Nearly half a century later, Souheir Elmasry is on a mission. By Nesmahar Sayed Souheir Elmasry's house in Maadi is calm and elegant, decorated simply, notably with abstract paintings by the well-known artists Adli Rizkallah and Aisha El-Mansouri. While serving mango juice, she explains that she likes abstraction because it leaves more room for the imagination. She wears bright colours and stunning green jewellery, the necklace "a gift from my daughter-in-law". The conversation starts with the story of her husband instigating their move to Minnesota, where she earned her PhD in drug metabolism, researching "something that cannot be seen with the naked eye". Cutting up cats with the help of surgeons for her first post- doctoral project was the next "big change" in her life: "My life is full of them, and though I'm always apprehensive at first, I do what I have to do as well as I can. Thank God I've always managed." A typical Taurus, she is calm and persistent, palpably younger than her years, and with enough enthusiasm for every Egyptian child: "When I first dreamt of being a scientist, my Arabic teacher, Ahmed Foheil, thought I was wrong -- that I would end up a writer. Ironically he was right." French educated, Elmasry's Arabic had been rusty when she started using it for the first time in 30 years, on returning from the US. Characteristically, she was undaunted -- and she regained her fluency fast enough; she even learned to type Arabic in three days after isolating herself for the purpose in a Red Sea resort. She had come back to stay once before, in the 1970s, only to return two months later; both decisions were made by her husband, and, much as she loved being with her family, as "the head of the household" she felt she must defer to him: "And the children were very happy to go back to the States, where one of them still lives while the other is in London." In Egypt Elmasry is enjoying her life with her daughter and grandchildren. Since then, working at Abbot Laboratories, she had become manager of "technology licensing" before retirement. And, faithful to the pharmaceutical industry, she is quick to point out that matters of pricing and the alleged exploitation they practise were always outside her field of interest: "A good manager makes a quick decision either to develop a given drug or not for the benefit of her company and hence, in theory at least, the consumer." In Egypt drug development is "not bad but could be much better", she muses, sadly. "We are a poor country." But drugs aside, motherhood has been Elmasry's first priority -- and raising her children as proud Arab American Muslims was the idea. She did not prevent them from integrating into American society, but at the same time would not let them forget who they are. As in every aspect of her life, she went about raising them in a systematic way, organisation being one of her instincts, though it is often suppressed by the creative drive -- all the more reason for her to stress organisation. Likewise her life as an Arab in America at a time, she says, when rights and freedom came before hatred and discrimination. Following the death of her husband in 1979, when things started to change to the worse, Elmasry became a founding member and eventually the president of the Chicago Arab American Anti- Discrimination Committee (ADC). She fought against keeping the song "I Killed an Arab" on the market -- and won. On another occasion, she collaborated with Chicago University professor John Woods to fight against anti- Arab prejudice at a local school. "Those were the good days of America," she comments, equating development with freedom -- the freedom to be creative, to feel committed to your goal and to maintain your independence. "Egypt could not develop without freedom," she goes on. "I do not micro-manage, I prefer to macro- manage; that way I get the best out of people." A member of the Illinois Humanities Council and the first Arab member of the Child, Youth and Family advisory committee, she was also the vice-president of the American Muslim Council: "We started a series of discussions on, among other topics, 'will Islam survive in America?'" A fruitful life abroad? She cites instituting the board of the Islamic Cultural Centre of greater Chicago, organising an exhibition of the work of Arab women artists. In Egypt, "I worked at a pharmaceutical consulting company but, though they appreciated what I did for them, I felt that Egypt was in greater need of work in the social service sector." This she felt was especially true in the light of the great numbers of children, who are impressionable and in whose hands the future lies. Having raised her own children alone in the US, she feels particularly qualified for the task, and wants to pass on her professional skills: empathy, developing self- worth... All of which is reinforced by her experience with the humanities practise of community-based self-reflective literature -- the inspiration behind the ME book she developed in Egypt in 2004 -- a journal-based programme in which children are gently prodded to answer questions about themselves, their lives, goals and dreams, thereby producing a personal history. "Then they realise how unique and special every one of them is." It was in this context that she discovered to what extent schoolchildren do not like to read -- the cause, as she found out, being television. Elmasry is profoundly unhappy with the way children are raised in Egypt -- in Al-Darb Al-Ahmar, for example, where, while lecturing, she discovered to her shock that most children watch television all night and sleep all day. By 2005, she had written on the dangers of television on children's brains -- a book she is particularly proud of, having done it all by herself, "with lots of editing". At that time, she published an article about the reading problem with the monthly review of books Wujhat Nazar. Three factors, she believes, are paramount: the lack of reading programmes at school, which would develop the habit and a love of books; the lack of control over television viewing, perhaps to be achieved through a family awareness programme; and the fact that mothers seldom read to their infants, another side of family awareness. She believes that letting children watch so much TV -- "turning them into visual, rather than word thinkers" -- is a form of abuse. Society fails to point out the risk of underdeveloped brains, schools fail to encourage reading. The Ministry of Education, she says, should collaborate with libraries to instill the habit of daily reading, starting at age six. She dreams of systematic reading programmes at schools. Another, rather more complex dream is of children having enough self worth not to lie or stumble in their work. As a member of Egypt 2000, in the 1970s, she had dealt with the topic, together with such projects as forming a delegation of Egyptian Americans to meet the Egyptian president. Self- worth, she insists, is the only way forward for Egypt. Her grandmother's lesson has always stayed with her: "Once I heard her describing someone as aleelet al-heela [helpless], that person wasn't making enough effort to develop resources or find alternatives; she was very unhappy. No one," she says, "no one at all should have to be aleelet al-heela."
