QENA - Some Egyptian villages have overcome the spectre of unemployment by specialising in certain professions, creating new jobs for the younger generation, rather than waiting for jobs simply to come along. Gragous, a village near Quess City in Qena Governorate, about 400 miles south of Cairo, is famous for its pottery. Many tourists buy the clay transformed by its potters into marvellous statues. Mohamed Gad el-Mawla, a citizen of Gragous, stresses that pottery, a traditional activity in the village, has helped them beat unemployment. In 1940, a school was opened in the village by a priest from the Levant, to teach the children and young people how to make pottery. In 1945, a pottery factory, built of adobe bricks, opened in Gragous. Nusseir Bekheit, 70, says they used to buy a tonne of mud from a public-sector company in Aswan for LE25. “The company has been privatised and we now have to pay LE500 [about $80],” he explains, adding that the factory used to make statues and crockery for tourists. “But now it just makes crockery, as the number of workers has decreased, while many of the villagers have started making pottery at home.” Meanwhile, the people of Sakyet Abu Sha'ra near Ashmoun City in el-Menoufiya Governorate, about 50 miles north of Cairo, specialise in manufacturing rugs and carpets from silk and wool. Their products are exported and unemployment isn't a problem in the village. When toppled president Hosni Mubarak visited Paris in 1988, he spotted a carpet hanging on a wall in the Elysée Palace. It had been handmade in Sakyet Abu Sha'ra. “The village has a population of 20,000, 80 per cent of whom are working in the carpet industry. They start learning the business at the age of seven,” according to Said el-Faramawi, head of the Regional Federation of NGOs. He has told al-Messa semi-official newspaper that this industry is suffering from several problems, including marketing difficulties, which may, regrettably, lead to its extinction. Many of the carpet makers are thinking of opening clothes factories or companies for electrical goods. The village of Kattama near Bassioun in el-Gharbia Governorate, about 60 miles northwest of Cairo, is well known for its furniture, vying with Damietta Governorate, which has a global reputation for manufacturing furniture. There are 3,000 furniture workshops in Kattama, so the villagers don't suffer from unemployment. Mohamed Moustafa, who has been working in one of these workshops since he was ten, learnt the tricks of trade from his father and his relatives, seasoned veterans in this field. Kamal el-Sayyed, who owns a furniture store in Kattama, says that this industry employs at least 10,000 young people in the village. “There aren't many coffee shops here, as all the young men are busy working,” he stresses. According to Ashraf Mahmoud, who works in a furniture store, most of the stores export their products to Europe. “The village is very rich because the workshops make a huge amount of money. This is a vital contribution to the national economy.”
