Dahab, in Memory

I loved Dahab. Look back and few posts and you'll see the fun I had in that tiny strip of hippy tourist heaven. Two days ago three terrorist bombs turned it into hell.

I had friends who were there, they screamed "Get down" as they heard one explosion after the other, one in a place they had shopped at an hour before. Another friend of mine was at one of the bombed restaurants, in the midst of screams and smoke. Around him lay his friends, some badly hurt. Less than 15 feet away his waiter lay dead - his brains and blood splattered across the floor. My friend escaped death that day, touched only by fate.

Some call this evil. Some say it's a play against the West or the Egyptian government. But I know who really felt it: The normal people -- Egyptians and foreigners.

The Egyptians: Denied the same hospital care foreigners got; told to look for friends among a stack of dead bodies; forced to watched as the town mayor pranced in among the carnage to see the damage -- until the angry, tearful owner of a destroyed restaurant grabbed him by his lapels and gave him a conscience in cuss words.

The foreigners: Vacationing German and American doctors quietly consoling the frantic and the dying, cheerfully bring some back from the brink of despair and death; a friend who wonders still if it's safe to go outside and can't stop wondering if that nice Egyptian man she met at a restaurant is alive or dead.

Dahab was peace. It was happiness. It was Bob Marley with an Egyptian accent. Now the burned bloody holes on the battered boardwalk serve notice that something worse than death can strike, turning each day into the blackest night.

It's called fear.