Dr. Nabil had lined up a meeting at New Horizons for today, but first we dropped in on the Egyptian Craft Center for a short talk with the director, Mona. Carrie wanted to hear from her how she categorized all of the artisan groups we had met as fair trade groups. Egyptian Craft Center (now Fair Trade Egypt) markets all of the products as fair trade, and we had seen a wide variety of size, structure and conditions among the groups we had visited. Mona was very eager to tell us how she sees the role of her organization as prodding producers along the path toward fair trade compliance without demanding profound changes in the way they operate. She believes that with more carrot than stick they will have better success in altering old ways of doing things.

Then we stepped out of the box a bit.At New Horizons we were met by our Mona, who represents New Horizons at TFD. She introduced us to the director, Nadi, and another member of the NGO, Tatiana, in their very comfortable offices. We enjoyed meeting Tatiana, who told us about the current projects of New Horizons which include working with small farmers and training young men in furniture making. She explained that they were looking at the organic and fair trade markets for their products and her perspective on what fair trade should and could be in Egypt was quite different from the model we had seen in our travels. Tatiana does believe that groups can be organized as cooperatives, but conceded that forming new groups would be easier than changing the way existing groups work. When talk turned to how TFD might be engaged in a fair trade campaign we all agreed that the first step was to work on a deeper understanding of the principles.

We were on our own for the rest of the day so Denise and I went downtown with Carrie where we joined her mom at their hotel. We relaxed with a game of hearts, Amr joined us briefly to hear about our day, we enjoyed dinner together and then Denise and I took the metro home to Ramsis. Even though our schedule seems lighter in these last days, we are all struggling with a vision for the future and that is weighty stuff.