Pregnant and eager to pay for an older daughter’s wedding, Omaima Zaki didn’t know the difference between a blank check and a grocery list when she signed the piece of paper that gave her $500 but also five years in a dystopian Egyptian prison.

I encountered Zaki’s story in Cairo, the second stop on my trip to the offices of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), where I am chairman of the board. The U.S. Congress set up the MBN in 2004 to provide objective, unbiased news and information across the Middle East and North Africa, areas of the world where censorship is as common as a hijab. The Arab language MBN has an audience of 31.1 million in 22 markets. I decided to visit some of the markets to learn more about the organization I chair.

When I embarked on my tour, I didn’t set out to follow a trail of tears for the Arab Spring, the surprising revolution ignited in 2010 by the self-immolation of Tunisian street peddler protesting police corruption. I wandered down that sorry path, though, after I visited Tunisia and then joined Amira Gadalla, an MBN correspondent working a story in Cairo, a vast sprawling North African metropolis and site of the Arab Spring’s most famous uprising.

Hope for freedom had soared more than a decade ago when protesters armed with cellphones and the internet coordinated a rebellion that toppled Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s long-standing dictator.

A day with Gadalla, though, made it clear that corruption, inequality, and the censor’s heavy hand had survived Mubarak’s ouster.

In Gadalla’s world, one dictator simply replaced another. Mubarak’s fall triggered political turmoil that led former General Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi to seize power in 2014. El-Sisi then imposed a system that requires journalists to obtain a license. The process crushes critics by pulling their official journalistic authorization, a career-ending move that can land a reporter and their sources in jail or worse.

Gadalla had scheduled an interview with the Children of Female Prisoners Association (CFPA) to report on the injustice and lack of human rights that land women like Zaki and their children to jail. I tagged along with her to learn how she practices the kind of journalism championed by the MBN under such an authoritarian system.

*Left to right: Samar Hassan, James O’Shea, and Amira Gadalla.*

The young MBA reporter had lined up a visit to one of Cairo’s poorest neighborhoods at the offices of the CFPA, a non-profit founded by Egyptian journalist Nawal Mostafa. While working on a story about the Qanater prison, Mostafa found conditions so appalling that that she set journalism aside to start the CFPA and fight the injustices. Gadalla decided to highlight the organization’s work in a story for Alhurra, an MBN broadcast outlet in Cairo. Just getting to the CFPA’s offices provides insights into why Egyptians tolerate a dictator like el-Sisi. At times the gnarling traffic jamming the dusty narrow streets makes the place seem ungovernable by any other means.

As our driver Mohamed Lashin navigated one of Cairo’s poorest areas on the city’s south side, many streets looked as if they’d been dug up by road crews installing sewer lines. Actually, they’d been neglected. Drivers in dented cars relentlessly leaned on their horns as they jostled for an edge in the stultifying heat trying to pass someone who had spontaneously stopped his car to get out and admire a rare spot of scenery. A man in an orange T-shirt wove his way through the traffic balancing five mattresses on his head while no one stopped to help woman crawl back into her toppled wheelchair. Everything from black Mercedes to donkey carts ferried goods and people to and between beauty parlors, fruit markets, phone shops, piles of shoes, washers and dryers, African wig stores and date stands. The thing that really confused me: speed bumps.

*photo of CFPA sewing shop by James O’Shea*

An ancient and intensely crowded city nearly three times as dense as New York City, Cairo lies within the shadows of pyramids, sphinxes, and obelisks, but the narrow, twisting lanes often lacked street signs and numbers. Lashin stopped repeatedly seeking directions until he pulled up to a weather-beaten, two-story building with cracked tiles and a sputtering generator in the first-floor hall. Dim narrow steps led to a large, second floor room filled with humming sewing machines. The flickering florescent lights seemed dim compared to the welcoming smile of Samar Hassan, who worked at the non-profit organization.

Dressed in a blue hijab, a white shirt, and loose-fitting jeans, she told Gadalla that one of the first women the CFPA had helped was Omaima Zaki. In what she described as a “blank check” scheme, she said Zaki, who was pregnant at the time, filled out the check that had been given her so she could raise $500 for an older daughter’s wedding. “She didn’t know what she was doing,” Hassan said. “She had never filled out a check and didn’t realize she had taken out a loan with interest. When Zaki couldn’t repay the $500 loan, Emad Hannazy, also from the CFPA, said a loan shark filed charges of default against her in a local Egyptian court.

“A judge,“ he told Gadalla, “had sentenced her to seven years in prison.” Since she was pregnant at the time, he said she gave birth to the child in prison, which she was allowed to keep her for two years until she was sent to an orphanage.

“This is terrible for a woman in Egypt,” he told Gadalla, “Neighbors and family shunned her because she had been sentenced to prison. Even worse, the child’s birth certificate lists the place of birth as a prison. In Egyptian society, the shame of that on your birth certificate condemns you for life.”

Funded by contributions and grants from foundations, the CFPA goes to court and pays off loans like those to Zaki. The organization also gets the court to expunge the jail record of the woman and the child’s place of birth. The CFPA reunites them and teaches women like Zaki a skill that they can use to earn a living. By paying off Zaki’s loan, the CFPA secured her released from jail after five years, and then taught her to make the clothes that keep the sowing machines humming on the CFPA second floor offices. The staff allowed us to take pictures of the women at work if we agreed not to show their faces. They have a clothing shop at the site to sell the wares made by the women. They also ship them to paying customers.

The CFPA officials told Gadalla that Zaki was one of thousands of women who have been imprisoned in the schemes involving blank checks and other skullduggery. Hassan said the organization had helped free more than 8,000 women and reunited them with 25,000 children since it was founded in 1990.

I asked Gadalla if she fears repercussions from a government that routinely warns, threatens, or even arrests journalists for stories that don’t present the censors in a favorable light. Since she focused her story on non-government organization, she said she didn’t think she would face problems, even though the facts portray the court system that el-Sidi controls unfavorably. “They call you in,” she says, “when you report stories on official government policies and even on politics that they don’t like.”

Also diluting any threat was a recent action by el-Sisi pardoning some eighty-five persons jailed for not paying debts, a practice that has been condemned by human rights organizations. The presidential decree, however, involved only a fraction of jailed women and included many men. Thousands of impoverished women and their children remain in jail.

Gadalla says Egyptian censorship limits the kinds of stories she can safely file. Even though the government can be harsh, she says there are ways to deal with the officials in the Interior Department that monitor the press. “I find if I try to be balanced and make efforts to get their side of the story, I can retain good relationships with them.” Many other Egyptian journalists have learned that can be a treacherous tightrope, though. “I’ve had threats that make me worry about my future and the future of my family,” one MBA reporter told me.

A day with Gadalla showed how the government remains an institution rife with corruption. By not attacking it directly, she hopes to continue her reporting to display the extent of Egyptian problems with inequality and economic strife. But it’s also clear that she is engaged in a delicate dance between the squalls and showers that darken Cairo skies in a nation where the Arab spring remains more than a season.

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.

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Any opinions or observations in this blog are purely those of the author and do not represent the official positions of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) or of the U.S. State Department’s Agency for Global Media, which administers federal grants to the MBN.

Imprisoned in Cairo

A day with Gadalla, though, made it clear that corruption, inequality, and the censor’s heavy hand had survived Mubarak’s ouster.

“A judge,“ he told Gadalla, “had sentenced her to seven years in prison.” Since she was pregnant at the time, he said she gave birth to the child in prison, which she was allowed to keep her for two years until she was sent to an orphanage.