When some people feel that the end is nigh, they choose to give up. But positive people face up to the challenge, and pick themselves up, brush themselves off and start all over again. "We chose to start again, because our dream is to see our country prosperous and its people happy," says Mostafa Mohamed, 23, the founder of the Yala Nebtedy (Let's Begin) initiative, which appeared after the January 25, 2011 Revolution and aims to spread positive energy among people. "We are a group of young people from different social backgrounds, of different ages and with point of views. What we have in common is that we share the same aim – changing ourselves, the people around us and our homeland for the better," he explains. Mostafa never knew about the study issued by Professor Mohamed Ghanem, the head of the Psychology Centre at Ain Shams University, a few months after the revolution which toppled ex-President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. The study reveals that, since the revolution of nearly two years ago, more than 17 per cent of Egyptians have been suffering from psychological disturbances, while 10 per cent have been suffering from obsession. The reason is that people have become depressed, feeling that nothing has changed and they still face the same problems. They thought that, after the revolution, everything would change for the better and that there would be more jobs and higher salaries, and that it would also be easier for them to get married. But none of this has happened. In this down-to-earth study, the Professor stresses that people have become more fragile and easily affected by nightmares, which have become regular nocturnal visitors. These nightmares are hardly surprising, because they are just the incarnations of what is happening around them all the time. As soon as people wake up in the morning, they witness destruction, blood and mothers wailing in Tahrir Square, Mohamed Mahmoud Street and around the Etihadia Palace. “This explains nightmares," according to the study. “People have become nervous and tense, as if waiting their turn to die or bid goodbye to a loved one." As Egyptians, who know exactly how their people feel, Mostafa and some friends founded Yala Nebtedy and tried to come up with ideas to help people overcome their fears and lead happy lives. Nearly three weeks ago, on December 20th, they came up with a new idea – a campaign entitled ‘Smile!'. They donned yellow T-shirts and chose el-Korba, a district very near to the Presidential Palace, to stand in the street holding posters with positive slogans on like: ‘Smile, it's free' and ‘If some one is sad, give him your smile'. The smiling team members also gave passersby chocolates and balloons and painted the faces of children. "We wanted to put a smile on their faces. Some of the passerbys watched us from a distance, but some approached and shared their smiles with us," says Mostafa, adding that their initiative is not funded by any political party or other association, but only by the members themselves. ‘Smile' was not their first campaign, as it was preceded by two others. The purpose of one of them, ‘With your old Clothes you can Make them Happy', was to collect people's old clothes and give them to the poor. In the course of their second campaign, ‘Protect them from the Cold Winter", they collected around 400 blankets for the National Cancer Institute in Egypt. "We handed out questionnaires, in order to pinpoint what people's dreams are and what they want to see in the New Egypt, in order to help us decide what our next campaign will be," Mostafa explains.
