From "Scenes from Egypt"
I caught up with an old friend from high school who's a lawyer now. He had this tragic story about how he had been the top of his class in law school, and he had passed the qualifications to be a judge. And he was moving along in this process until one day he was inexplicably removed from the pipeline.
His dad asked around with his backchannels and realized that apparently, this was political retribution.
Years ago, his dad had at one point criticized the president's economic plan, as a member of parliament (or something like that). The real rub was that, his dad had long been supportive of this president and voted for him & vouched for him early on.
And that was that. He was now trying to make a living getting into arbitration for large companies & running his own law firm.
Now Egypt has been dealing with daily power outages, so I was curious if that affected his work. I knew for example that they don't cut power from hospitals, so I wondered if they made a similar exception to the courts.
Nope. "You could be in a middle of a murder trial" he said. Oh, the power's out? Alright, guards, take this man back to jail.
We'll see you tomorrow, have a good night.
Read more Scenes from Egypt.