importance to Egypt. It flows north from the Burundi to the Mediterranean Sea, a distance of 6,650 kilometres: it is the longest river in the world!
Viewing an arial shot of the Nile, you find the Nile River Valley resembling a lotus flower; hence the ancient Egyptian symbol for the regeneration of life. The narrow river valley is the stem, the trangle shaped delta is the flower, and Fayyum Region southwest of Cairo is a bud.
The Nile used to flood the valley year after year, enriching the land with a thick layer of rich soil. But at times, excessive flooding caused destruction and loss of property and life. To remedy this, they built the Aswan Dam in 1902 and there has been no flooding since then.
I don't know if you know this but rainfall is almost non-existent in Egypt. The Nile floods provided the only source of moisture needed to sustain crops. Ancient Egyptians dug irrigation canals to control the water, particularly during dry spells. To appreciate the importance of the Nile to Egypt, one needs only find Egypt on Google Map: there on the map the entire country of Egypt is desert yellow except a thin strip of green along the Nile and a green patch in its delta. The country has a population of more than 100 million, and 95 percent of them live within a few kilometers of the Nile！
About "發端於人本身的缺陷的社會弊病":
Take Mo'men, our tour guide, for example.
He supports the uprising that toppled Mubarak's government. He claims he wants an American brand of capitalism in the hope that such a system would allow private sector businesses like his travel agency to flourish. At the same time, he is an admirer of Nasser and totally buys into Nasser's brand of patriotism/socialism and lauds the government subsidies which he and his family enjoy very much. But these are the same subsidies that have been used by the military regimes to keep themselves in power and these same subsidies have been blamed for stiflying private sector businesses and bleeding Egyptian economy dry.
One reads comments like this on the internet about those subsidies: “Subsidies, which have always represented the social contract between the governing regime and the population, are a major problem [in Egypt]. "
When you look at a person like Mo'men and assume he is not alone but is representative of millions upon millions of Egyptians, and if you assume Lord Acton's words ("Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”) applie to the Egyptian regimes, you understand why, though reforming subsidies has consistently been a concern, no regime over the last 60 years has been able (or willing) to implement serious measures. You also understand why the Egyptians, who overwhelmingly supported the uprising, are now again under military rule.
So in the case of Egypt, you have, on the one hand, the Egyptian in the street who's addicted to the subsidies, and you have, on the other, the power that be that is corrupted by power and wants to keep it at any cost. The sacrificial lamb has been the effort to reform these subsidies.
Does this ring true? ----- To successfully reform social ills, the (self-claimed) supporters of the reform need to first reform those they see in the mirror. :)
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