Sensational News from the Land of the Cow!

One of my best friends in Egypt is Mohamed Rafaat Abdelmomen who up to recently was "Rais El Medina" (which translated is: "Head of the City") in one of Egypt's five major Oasis.

Today he is back as Chairman of Dakhla Oasis, the neighbour oasis where he was born.

If you look at this map I did of Egypt (with ground base help of Territory Mapper - a brilliant program I will come back to later). Here you will see that Farafra is located far from the Nile Oasis and on the border of the Great Sand Sea - the largest sand dune field in the world which Egypt share with Libya.

The famous story goes that Farafra up to recently was so isolated that the inhabitants of the oasis once lost totally track of time. In the end they had to send a person to Dakhla Oasis to find out which day it was, so they could hold the Friday prayer on the right day...

A not so known story, which Mohamed Rafaat Abdelmomen told me, was that after the revolution in 1952 - the inhabitants had to do another journey.

This time to Cairo to inform the government that they where starving and had no food. Caravans of trucks were soon after sent to the starving people of Farafra. Today the oasis is one of the important food chambers of Egypt - exporting to the rest of Egypt and beyond. Agriculture is today as in ancient time based upon getting water from the ground water - which originates from areas with rain seasons further south in Africa.

Many people come from the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta to the oasis to start a new life as farmers in this development area. The start of their new life here is supported and helped by the government.

In 1996 my wife and I were sitting on the local bus on the road from Cairo to Farafra. In front of us a fairly young couple from somewhere in Europe (it seemed). What interested me was that they had a book about Farafra which I never had seen before (and such do tease me! Something I don't know? Eh?).

I managed to see that the title of the book was "The vanishing past time" - with under title "socio-economic and geographic studies in Farafra oasis (Egypt) in 1992".

Unable to stay away from a treasure as an unknown book, I started to talk with them. It turned out they was part of a group from Faculty of Geography and Regional Studies, University of Warsaw (Poland). They had done the study in 1992, and we were sitting on the bus in 1996. For us the journey was to visit the Head of the Oasis - for them to go back and see "old research ground".

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