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Shahira Fawzy, an inspiring activist, exotic designer and anthropologist
CAIRO, Egypt
Egypt Today, August 2008 Volume # 29 Issue 08
Shahira Fawzy’s life changed when she discovered a “lost” tribe in the Eastern Desert. She’s since made it her life’s work to improve the lives of isolated nomads and share their cultures.
FACES
By Nicolè A. Staab
GALLABA: THE BRINGER. A female ‘middleman’ who works between nomads and city dwellers, exchanging city goods such as sugar, coffee, tea and flour for the goods the nomads offer such as lambs, charcoal, gold and silver.
With goodwill missions taking her to all of the Egyptian deserts, remote Yemeni villages, the border of India and China; global recognition as a distributor of jewelry and crafts; UN accolades; her own non-governmental organization (called Capacity)—and no less than seven films about her life, she is esteemed and recognized at home and abroad.
But who is Shahira Fawzy?
You could call her an anthropologist, entrepreneur, philanthropist, even a designer. While it takes more than a label to truly understand who a person is, there is one word that truly describes her: Shahira is a ‘bringer.’
But Shahira isn’t a typical gallaba in that she doesn’t barter commodities. She is a bringer in a much more philosophical sense. To the Bishari tribe in Egypt’s southeastern desert, she is a bringer of new ideas to an ancient way of life. To the women in the mountains near Sohag, she is a bringer of commerce and economy. To villagers in Yemen, she is a bringer of knowledge and education, as well as trade skills and crafts. To Egypt and the world at large, she is a bringer of culture — showcasing the culture of people from isolated regions.
Shahira speaks passionately of the joys of the simple life, money’s threat to happiness and the all-too-often misunderstood concepts of wants and needs, an unexpected philosophy from the only daughter of an upper-class Egyptian family. With a double-BA in Anthropology and Economics from the American University in Cairo and an MA in Economic Anthropology from Boston University, Shahira had the world at her fingertips. In 1970, she was planning her wedding and had scheduled a trip to China with her university.
“But then my professor needed my help [and] asked me to go with them to Lake Nasser to do some study on the water pollution of the lake,” she recalled.
A Forgotten People
That experience was a defining moment for Shahira. She decided to relocate, calling the desert “home” for the next 15 years of her life. What prompted this young woman to leave behind the only world she knew? Blame the binoculars.
If it hadn’t been for the pair of binoculars Shahira constantly kept at her side, she never would have known that a tribe of people were living in the desert east of Lake Nasser — and neither would the rest of the world.
Shahira loved to look for fox and hyenas while exploring the lake’s eastern fjords. One afternoon, while standing on a cliff, she spied a herd of animals in the distance — and a human standing nearby. She went down to the shore to investigate.
“Normally, we were warned not to go down, but I didn’t listen,” Shahira says with a little laugh. “I approached the shoreline and then I see from far away those women — young girls — who were a bronze-brown [color] with long plaits full of beads and shells, half covered around their waists and little pieces of material thrown on their shoulders.”
To Shahira’s disappointment, the women fled. “I thought that being humans, we were going to talk. But they ran, leaving a child and a goat in the bush.”
Eventually, the women returned, this time with a man. “His hair was completely blown up on the top and he had plaits on the back of his hair like people I had never seen before.”
Shahira was reduced to finger signs and charades to communicate with the man. The breakthrough: “I kept saying ‘Aswan, Aswan’,” and in response, the man pointed at himself and replied, ‘Abraq, Abraq’.”
Shahira’s map pinpointed Abraq in the center of the Eastern Desert, but there was no record of any inhabitants. The next day, the 19-year-old woman followed the people into the desert.
“We walk for like a couple of hours and then we reach a cocoon-shaped home that looks like a big stone,” she says. “And then I come back to Cairo and I explain to the government here that I found those people.”
The officials didn’t believe her, brushing off her ‘tribe’ as a passing caravan. “They tell me those people don’t exist. I can’t [accept] it,” Shahira explains emphatically. “I’m 19, approaching 20, and at that age you want to prove something.”
Postponing her wedding, she returned to the desert to photograph the tribe she discovered — the Bishari, modern Egypt’s lost tribe.
When the Aswan Dam was built in 1963, Old Nubia, the Bishari’s ancestral land, was flooded. Thousands of Nubian villagers were relocated, but no one knew that the nomads were there, nor that their only pasture was now submerged.
From the tribesmen, Shahira learned that they “were waiting for the ‘torrent’ to dry — the rain. They say that the torrential rains have come from the hills and have sunk Nubia and all the lands and all the pastures. And they were waiting for it to dry.”
She tried to tell them about the dam and how their “torrent” was a permanent lake. Like the officials in Cairo, the Bishari didn’t believe her. “They said, ‘No, no you are young. You don’t understand, we are old people, we live in this desert, we know exactly what we are talking about.’”
Unable to convince them that the waters would not recede, she decided to stay on and help them. To the Bishari people, Shahira is a bringer of change. The first thing she introduced to them was the idea of digging wells.
At that time Shahira didn’t have outside funding; she was working on the pocket money she received from her father. She paid one worker LE 250, but couldn’t afford to hire people to do the digging.
“So I asked two of the nomads to help him and then I discovered that those people can learn how to do it. So the two guys learn how to dig and they also go and get two guys each and begin to dig more wells across the desert.”
Two years later, the development and relief agency Oxfam contacted her with an offer of funding. With that and contributions from European nations, the Bishari dug 25 large wells along a route between Lake Nasser and the Red Sea hills, each well 30 kilometers apart — one day’s walk for a camel.
Shahira Fawzy is in the middle.Photo: eastvaganza.com
Next, Shahira recognized that their handicrafts and jewelry had market appeal. She introduced precious stones to the traditional designs and sold them in Cairo. The money went back to the Bisharis to improve their lives with water-storage containers and a meeting building housing a clinic, school and mosque.
“[In the desert] you learn how little you are, how weak you are and how strong you can be. That is how life goes on in the desert: If you are human then you are entitled to what I’ve got, and if I’m human I am entitled to what you’ve got. And you reciprocate that way. It’s like a complete unity of humanity against [an] environment that is so difficult that they are fighting it together and they have to care for each other, so it’s a completely different world.
“I remember looking at the ground full of those dried fruits that sold in Aswan for 25 [piasters] and thinking ‘oh look, if you collect all of this, this will be a lot of money back in the city’ — because this is our normal way of thinking but then by the end of my trip I brought nothing back with me. You begin to realize that our world is one where everybody is competing to get the same things — things that they need and things that they want — everything is being taken.”
The Sahara Movement
Shahira’s success with the Bishari tribe’s crafts drew invitations for projects with other aid agencies. UNICEF asked her to work with women in the mountains near Sohag, where she taught them how to draw on their knowledge and environment to create unique, marketable items. Thus began what Shahira calls “The Sahara Movement.”
The Sahara Gallery(Photo: eastvaganza.com) was born in Shahira’s tiny Cairo flat, with nomad crafts stored around the rooms, under the bed and wherever else there was available space. Eventually Sahara turned into the formal gallery that it is today in Heliopolis — not only exhibiting handiwork from various regions but also offering desert adventure trips and craft classes taught by the nomads themselves.
By this time, Shahira was a veteran gallaba, linking two very different worlds. To the people in Cairo and abroad, Shahira was a bringer of a new culture, a new world through jewelry and crafts and information.
To the tens of thousands of rural women supporting themselves in this manner, Shahira became a bringer of independence. Earning an income makes people feel important. But for Shahira the benefit is more than just about making money — it is about keeping cultures alive and sharing them with the world.
In Yemen, the approach was different but the outcome just as rewarding. As the Director of Hodaidah Primary Health System Support Project (better known as the Dutch Project), Shahira was a bringer of education, creating a year-long training program for doctors and nurses to improve the standards of healthcare.
Developing skills changes a person’s life; it creates an identity and aids in liberation from poverty. “I believe my role has a beginning and an end. I am just reminding them of what they’ve got, but then I am giving them their freedom I don’t believe that people should be over-adopted, people should be given the knowledge and the freedom to utilize what is around them,” she explains.
But she hasn’t forsaken the desert or the people that she has strived to assist. Her role has now evolved to that of a marketing consultant, working on new jewelry and craft designs for the villagers and exposing them to the world. To that end, the Sahara Gallery is hosting a special three-day exhibit in early December.
Wherever she goes, be it the desert, the mountains, the city shops or the nonprofit boardrooms, it is obvious to everyone that Shahira touches, she is a bringer of hope — hope for a better future.
Shahira Fawzy is in the middle.Photo: eastvaganza.com
Next, Shahira recognized that their handicrafts and jewelry had market appeal. She introduced precious stones to the traditional designs and sold them in Cairo. The money went back to the Bisharis to improve their lives with water-storage containers and a meeting building housing a clinic, school and mosque.
“[In the desert] you learn how little you are, how weak you are and how strong you can be. That is how life goes on in the desert: If you are human then you are entitled to what I’ve got, and if I’m human I am entitled to what you’ve got. And you reciprocate that way. It’s like a complete unity of humanity against [an] environment that is so difficult that they are fighting it together and they have to care for each other, so it’s a completely different world.
“I remember looking at the ground full of those dried fruits that sold in Aswan for 25 [piasters] and thinking ‘oh look, if you collect all of this, this will be a lot of money back in the city’ — because this is our normal way of thinking but then by the end of my trip I brought nothing back with me. You begin to realize that our world is one where everybody is competing to get the same things — things that they need and things that they want — everything is being taken.”
The Sahara Movement
Shahira’s success with the Bishari tribe’s crafts drew invitations for projects with other aid agencies. UNICEF asked her to work with women in the mountains near Sohag, where she taught them how to draw on their knowledge and environment to create unique, marketable items. Thus began what Shahira calls “The Sahara Movement.”
The Sahara Gallery(Photo: eastvaganza.com) was born in Shahira’s tiny Cairo flat, with nomad crafts stored around the rooms, under the bed and wherever else there was available space. Eventually Sahara turned into the formal gallery that it is today in Heliopolis — not only exhibiting handiwork from various regions but also offering desert adventure trips and craft classes taught by the nomads themselves.
By this time, Shahira was a veteran gallaba, linking two very different worlds. To the people in Cairo and abroad, Shahira was a bringer of a new culture, a new world through jewelry and crafts and information.
To the tens of thousands of rural women supporting themselves in this manner, Shahira became a bringer of independence. Earning an income makes people feel important. But for Shahira the benefit is more than just about making money — it is about keeping cultures alive and sharing them with the world.
In Yemen, the approach was different but the outcome just as rewarding. As the Director of Hodaidah Primary Health System Support Project (better known as the Dutch Project), Shahira was a bringer of education, creating a year-long training program for doctors and nurses to improve the standards of healthcare.
Developing skills changes a person’s life; it creates an identity and aids in liberation from poverty. “I believe my role has a beginning and an end. I am just reminding them of what they’ve got, but then I am giving them their freedom I don’t believe that people should be over-adopted, people should be given the knowledge and the freedom to utilize what is around them,” she explains.
But she hasn’t forsaken the desert or the people that she has strived to assist. Her role has now evolved to that of a marketing consultant, working on new jewelry and craft designs for the villagers and exposing them to the world. To that end, the Sahara Gallery is hosting a special three-day exhibit in early December.
Wherever she goes, be it the desert, the mountains, the city shops or the nonprofit boardrooms, it is obvious to everyone that Shahira touches, she is a bringer of hope — hope for a better future.
