Haj Omar doesn’t know how old he is exactly, but he says he approaches 80. An Ababda tribe member, and a Marsa Alam native, he’s probably done it all. He worked in the gold mines as a child, spent years on boats fishing across the Red Sea, traveled around the desert with his cattle.
You get to know of the breaking news today within seconds via the internet and satelite TV. Haj Omar, as a child working in the gold mines, recalls how the news of the “1952 revolution” took “a long time” to reach him in Marsa Alam. “News used to travel by the word of mouth. I learned about Muhammad Nagib and Gamal Abdel Nasser through a talk in the mine with other workers. They heard the news from people coming from Quseir. The people from Quseir heard it from elsewhere. We didn’t have newspapers or radio.”
