I am writing these lines from Beirut, where political life is currently being dominated by the unanimous approval by the Parliament's Justice Committee of a bill which allows trying not only ministers but also the President, the Prime Minister and the Speaker of Parliament. As for us in Egypt, we have been talking in vain about a law to try ministers since 1958. However, this is another story. I once read that the Lebanese government gets $1,000 a year for any foreign female housekeeper, while such fee diminishes if her employer wants to get a second one. This is an idea that makes us think about we do in Egypt - or what we could do in the future - regarding the same issue. We still feel ashamed to send our elder relatives to a retirement home, while girls are ashamed to work as housekeepers and do not accept such kind of job unless they are in a desperate situation. At the same time, though, we know very well that many well-off families resort to housekeepers from the Philippines, Eritrea and elsewhere. Each one of them costs almost $500 (some LE 3,000) per month, taking into account the plane ticket to bring them here, the money for the broker and their salary. And this goes on simply because there is no alternative. The strange thing is that this happens every day in a country with as a high unemployment rate as nowhere else. Egypt's Manpower Minister Aisha Abdel Hadi says the global financial crisis will lead to an additional one million unemployed, but she – or indeed the government as a whole – is not thinking of an alternative to imported housekeepers, an alternative worth hundreds of thousands of decent and profitable job opportunities. All it takes is to start from where the others have ended. So, let's look at Lebanon! The Ministry of Manpower could practically think of collecting a specific tax for each foreign housekeeper. Then, it could immediately use this money to set up a school providing local educated alternatives ready to carry out this job with no sense of shame. Such kind of school could teach children's and elderly people's psychology (including when it comes to Alzheimer patients), different cultures, honesty, hygiene and various hobbies. At the end of the day, we would have highly-qualified housekeepers capable of taking these job opportunities and we would no longer have to look for such workers abroad and pay them every month in dollars. The government, though – including the competent ministry – is now just watching millions of dollars going out of the country to thousands of foreign workers. We should think seriously about setting up such kind of school or institute. Any girl enrolled could then work for any well-off family and get LE 2,000 per month. This way, the cost of this service would be halved, the state would put an end to the flow of hard currency out of our country and would give many profitable job opportunities to hundreds of thousands of women hopelessly looking for a job. Now, under the current circumstances, if any unemployed girl finds a job as civil servant for a few Egyptian pounds per month, she knows that this would not be enough for her, that she would do nothing in her new post and that this could just be a sort of mutual fraud between her and the government. So far, we have just been making a fool of ourselves and have not looked at the alternatives in front of our eyes.