Bedouins go back to their roots in Egypt as COVID-19 hits tourism

MENNA A FAROUK -

For years, Um Saad has been urging fellow Bedouins to tend their orchards and vegetable patches in the mountains of Egypt’s South Sinai.

It took a pandemic for them to listen to her. Tourism, her community’s main source of income, has been wobbly for years — rattled by militant attacks and political unrest.

But COVID-19 has decimated the sector, encouraging many Bedouins to go back to the livelihoods of their ancestors. “This is one good thing about the coronavirus,” said Um Saad, 75, sitting outside the house where she has lived for decades near the town of Saint Catherine, occasionally hosting foreign visitors hiking in the mountainous region.

“For me, agriculture and tourism have always been in parallel. But agriculture is the major source of sustaining life here,” she said.

Since the pandemic brought tourism to a virtual standstill in March, hundreds of Bedouins have returned to their plots in the mountains of Saint Catherine, which have often served as a haven in times of political upheaval and war.

“We experienced that also during the January 25 Revolution in 2011 and the war in 1992,” said Ahmed Farhan, a Bedouin in his late 30s, who arrived back in the region in May after losing his job as a tour guide.

The revolution that toppled late president Hosni Mubarak nine years ago, and the 2015 bombing of a Russian passenger jet, dealt sharp blows to Egyptian tourism from which it had only just recovered when the coronavirus outbreak hit. Gathering crops from the newly replanted garden tended by his father before him, Farhan said he produces enough to feed himself and sell the surplus.

He no longer wants to return to his former work taking tourists to Mount Sinai. “This life is the best. I’m eating healthy food, drinking clean water from the wells here and also making money out of the crops that I grow. What more could I need?” said Farhan, who grows grapes, honey, almonds and vegetables.

Tourism accounts for up to 15 per cent of Egypt’s gross domestic product (GDP) and officials have said the country was losing about $1 billion each month since COVID-19 shut borders and airports. One of Egypt’s biggest tourism draws, alongside historic sites such as Luxor and the Pyramids of Giza, are the sandy beaches of the South Sinai — home to the Sharm el Sheikh resort.

— Thomson Reuters Foundation