A time for renewal

By Dahlia Hammouda
USHERING in a new season, on Sunday morning Mrs Suzanne Mubarak opened the 78th Spring Flower Exhibition held in the gardens of the Agricultural Museum in Doqqi. Jointly organised by the Horticultural Farming Society and the Ministry of Agriculture, the event features a wide variety of rare flowers and palm trees and will be open to the public until 17 April.
Mrs Mubarak toured the different wings housing the works of 103 participants from the private sector, schools, societies specialised in the planting and export of flowers, and the Horticultural Services Unit at the Ministry of Agriculture.
According to Youssef Wali, minister of agriculture, Mrs Mubarak agreed to open the exhibition -- held on a 9,000-square-metre plot of land -- because she feels it is important to encourage young graduates entering the field of horticulture and seeking to expand their productive capacities as a means of promoting the national economy through export. Such endeavours will also help create job opportunities for young people in general.
Total proceeds from exports of the exhibition's products during the past five years have reached LE15 million, Wali said, adding that the value of exports from this year's exhibition is estimated at LE6 million.
Following the event, Mrs Mubarak headed to Heliopolis, where she planted a Japanese cherry tree on Abu Bakr Al-Seddiq Street. The tree is among 1,200 Japan's Egyptian-Japanese Friendship Society has donated to Egypt.
In the afternoon, Mrs Mubarak hosted a luncheon in honour of Mervat Tellawy, former secretary-general of the National Council for Women (NCW), who has assumed a new prominent international post as assistant to the secretary-general of the United Nations and executive director of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). Mrs Mubarak thanked Tellawy for her valuable role in establishing the council and her efforts in ensuring its success during its first year since its launch in February 2000. Tellawy has been succeeded as NCW secretary-general by NCW member Farkhonda Hassan.
Sunday evening, Mrs Suzanne Mubarak attended the opening of Wikalat Bazar'a, a 17th-century commercial building in the Gamaliya area of Fatimid Cairo. It took six years of painstaking refurbishment to restore the building, originally designed to house merchants passing through Cairo and including storehouses for their goods.
The restoration work was carried out by the Supreme Council of Antiquities at a total cost of LE5 million and involved polishing the walls and cleaning and restoring the mashrabiya. Wood, soap and coffee imported from Yemen were originally sold at Wikalat Bazar'a, which has two floors, the lower for commercial transactions and the upper as dormitories for the Yemeni merchants.
Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni said the wikala will now serve as a centre for art and environment-related crafts. In addition, plans are being made for the wikala to host craftspeople from all over the world for specific periods of time to display and sell their products.
Wikalat Bazar'a stands on Al-Tumbukshiya Road, off Gamaliya Street in an area of Fatimid Cairo that the Ministry of Culture is planning to restore and refurbish one section at a time. The ultimate aim is to transform the area into an open-air museum.
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