CAIRO - While hundreds of thousands of Egyptian schoolchildren and university students celebrated the one-week extension of the mid-year holidays, Hamza Mahmoud was lost in despair after hearing the news. Mahmoud works in a stationary shop in el-Fagala, downtown Cairo, which was first hit by the demonstrations in Al Tahrir Square in central Cairo and then by the holiday extension. "I've been waiting for the first week of the second academic term for several months," Mahmoud said angrily, adding that it was the high season for him, but they were postponing it, as if he didn't have a family to support. This 39-year-old man was not aware that he suffered much less than others, who didn't only get their high seasons postponed by another week, but utterly and totally lost them. Last Tuesday marked the Islamic Moulid al-Nabi (Prophet Mohammed's birthday) celebration, traditionally accompanied by scores and scores of Moulid festive sweets. Producing them makes factories and shops flourish – but not this year. "I'm still counting my losses," Mohamed Ebada, who owns a small supermarket that got turned into the Moulid-sweets shop, told The Egyptian Gazette despairingly. "People aren't just in need of money, and it's not that the prices of sweets are high. People are full of the revolution and major changes, there is no space for anything else." Last year, Egyptians spent around LE5 billion on 35,000 tonnes of Moulid sweets produced by 4,000 factories, according to the Egyptian Chamber for Food Industries. "What sweets?" wondered Ehsan Abdel-Tawab, a 48-year-old housewife. "We have barely managed to survive during the past weeks, with salaries suspended and banks closed." Abdel-Tawab, a mother of three, works at a State-owned institution. It only started to give employees their salaries last Wednesday. She is not alone with this economic dilemma, as banks all over the country closed their doors for weeks and are due to re-open today. So, much more than ‘high seasons' were lost. Post-Valentine gifts Amir Abul-Ela, 26, was standing in the door of his small gift shop in Nasr City in Cairo, watching people as they passed, and tried to catch a sign that this crisis might come to an end. "I've bought huge amounts of beautiful Valentine gifts, and now all I think about is how to pay the rest of my instalments. My business has been hit badly," the young man told this newspaper,while posing in front of a mountain of red teddy bears, stuffed toys and romantic gifts. Abul-Ela waits for Valentine's Day from year to year – like the majority of gifts shops. His preparations for this day take months of hard work, but losing this season isn't what concerns him now. "I can live with losing this Valentine season or even my whole business," Abul-Ela said. "But I can't stand losing the dream of a better future for this country. In the past few weeks I did not only experience the recession; I experienced hope, and I'm not ready to let it go, ever again," Abul-Ela concluded.
