CAIRO: Whenever I come back from abroad, I find the strangest voicemail messages on my mobile phone, which I insist on not taking with me when I travel, otherwise, I'd feel that I'm still in Egypt. After two weeks abroad, I came back to find a warning message that my inbox is full and that 72 callers were thus unable to leave their voice messages. I thanked God for that and then listened to the messages I had to delete to empty my voicemail box ahead of Eid Al-Adha, during which I receive a lot of messages and calls. Among these, there was an angry message whose sender said he will never call me again because he had sent four messages before that I hadn't replied to. In fact, I received four messages from this person, where he asked me to call him back, leaving his telephone number. But because I was abroad, I received neither his telephone number nor his messages. As for the rest of the voice messages, there was a funny one of "Hello, Hello without leaving a message or mentioning his name as if the caller imagines that if he kept on repeating the word "hello, I will emerge from the telephone set to answer his call. In others, the callers didn't utter a word. So, I had minutes of absolute silence. In another one of these messages, the caller did not record his message but kept telling someone beside him "I left a message but he doesn't want to answer and added "shame on you, I'm paying for this call. There was, however, one witty caller. He had called several times and left his phone number but I definitely didn't call him back, so he voice-mailed me back saying: "We had a raffle and your phone number won one million Egyptian pounds. Please call us to get your prize. Definitely, the number I was given to call to receive the prize was in fact the telephone number of the witty guy I have just mentioned. He did this to make sure that I call back. Some other messages were by readers I do not know who wanted to leave their comments on events or alert me to something that I should write about. In some of these I found some noteworthy remarks. "Did you know that it's been five years since journalist Reda Hilal disappeared? Did you know that Hilal's case is not as exceptional as some people might imagine. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, for example, had monitored in its recent report 70 cases of forced disappearance from 1992 up till now. Fifty-four of them are still missing. Our free press should have focused on this topic rather than focusing on insulting people and gossiping about them, said one message. Another reader left this message: "I just want to say that the murder case of Laila Ghoufran's daughter and her girlfriend taught some lessons not only to the press but also to the government. The government should ask itself why people couldn't believe that the young man, who was arrested and confessed to the crime, is the real killer. I won't answer this question in a voice message with my telephone number. I would rather you tried to find out the reasons behind lack this of confidence in the government and address them in your article. Regarding lessons we should learn, Dr Amjad Al-Saftawi left a voice message saying: "Barack Obama's success in the US presidential elections should open the eyes of Arabs to some important facts. For example, If Obama were born in an Arab country, he could not have obtained the nationality as he did in the US and could not have ascended to power. The majority of Arab countries still do not grant their nationalities except through the father. This was the situation in Cairo until recently. Mothers used to spend a lot of time moving from one government office to another to renew their children's visas; those children were treated like foreigners even if their fathers were nationals of our Arab neighbors. The last call was from a friend called Marwan, who sends me jokes he made up himself because of the scarcity of new Egyptian jokes in recent years. In his opinion, the dearth of Egyptian jokes is a crisis like many others our country's witnessing nowadays. "Egyptian businessmen, he said "were so badly hit by the global financial crisis that they're only sleeping with their own wives! Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Arab Writers' Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
