The Egypt in Youssef Hanna’s heart is strong.

It is a country that hasn’t experienced a government’s corruption or any of the sadness that has been caused by a cabinet with the worst of intentions.

But the Egypt in Youssef Hanna’s heart doesn’t exist yet.

Hanna, 28, graduate in computer science, knows only of the country shaped by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak‘s 30-year term.

“We have been treated like second-class citizens for a whole long time,” Hanna said. “We would like to be treated like humans.”

Mubarak was sworn into office in 1981, only two years before Hanna was born in Cairo.

Five years ago, Hanna came to Iowa State to study after attending the American University in Cairo. Each day he was in school, he would go to where the heart of the uprising in Egypt would occur: Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo.

Living only a kilometer away from the presidential palace, Hanna and his family, like most Egyptian families, lived in an apartment about 15 kilometers outside Cairo.

His parents still live there; and after the police “disappeared” and the protesting surged Jan. 28. Three days after the protests began, Hanna’s parents and their neighbors began protecting their homes from “thugs.”

Each apartment building started to have its own protection plan due to the thefts that had been reported across Cairo.

Hanna visited his parents during Winter Break and returned Jan. 18 to Iowa.

When he heard of the protests only days after, Hanna called his parents on a landline phone because the government had blocked the Internet and other communication devices.

His parents said they were OK, and now things are starting to get back to normal: banks are starting to open and people are tired of the instability.

Hanna finds that whatever normalcy is, it will not be such an easy task to achieve.

After Mubarak’s speech Thursday, Hanna called home to speak with his parents and checked with his friends on Facebook who were very frustrated.

“He’s just not going to step down,” Hanna said. “People are doing peaceful demonstrations, but [they’re] going to lose their tempers eventually. He’s just pushing us more and more. 

“I just hope [today] isn’t violent. Usually Fridays are the biggest protests. I just hope the Army joins in. If they don’t, tomorrow is definitely going to be bloody.”

Mubarak’s country

The Egyptian government said last week that the number of people injured from protests across the country is about 5,000, and Human Rights Watch said the death toll has been tallied at more than 300 deaths since protesting began late January.

Although the organized transfer of power into democracy and cabinet reform that Vice President Omar Suleiman spoke of is currently underway because of Mubarak’s statement about not running again in September, Hanna and other Egyptians are expressing their doubt that Mubarak will stay true to his word.

“He has been lying for 30 years,” Hanna said. “I don’t see a change unless he leaves.”

Among these changes, Hanna wants the emergency laws stopped that give the government the right to arrest anyone, anywhere and at any time.

The country’s Parliament should be dissolved because 97 percent of the positions in it have been appointed by Mubarak.

Hanna wants Egypt’s Constitution to change, and the country’s president should only be able to be elected as in the United States’ system.

Another crucial change Hanna wants to see made is having elections not monitored by the government or ruling party.

Hanna went to vote at a police station in 2005 on a change in Egypt’s Constitution.

“[Mubarak] hires thugs to stop people from going to vote,” Hanna said.

He arrived at what he thought would be a responsible station, but the poll was so unorganized that Hanna could have voted twice without anyone noticing and realized that no civil society monitored the elections or results. It was chaos, he said.

The uprising

When Hanna graduated in 2004, he couldn’t support himself on the salary he was receiving and moved back in with his parents.

“You feel like you cannot afford anything,” Hanna said. “There’s no hope for tomorrow.”

The revolution in Tunisia was a surprise for those in the Middle East, he said. Nobody thought it would happen in Egypt because they thought the government was stronger, but it turned out not to be true.

Everything afterward started with a Facebook invite and a necessary reply of, “Attending,” “Maybe Attending” or “Not Attending.”

No one in Egypt thought one of those invitations would become a reality, Hanna said, but hundreds of people started showing up to protest.

When the government decided to block the Internet, Hanna said he couldn’t believe they would do that; isolating Egypt from the whole world showed how unstable and weak the government is and how scared it is of its people.

“I think if protests are over now, that would be a waste of lives, money and time,” Hanna said.

A constant fear within the country and among his friends on Facebook, he said, is that people are losing momentum and need to regain the drive they once had.

“If this loses, we’re screwed,” he said. “Because the government would be so much more cruel to ensure that something like this would never happen again.”

Magie Fakuos, 20, junior in interior design, and her family moved to Mason City seven years ago for religious freedom and a better education for Fakuos and her older sister.

“My big worry is that the Muslim Brotherhood will take over if Mubarak leaves right away,” Fakuos said.

Hanna has been asked if he is afraid that Egypt will turn into a country like Iran, which many link to the Muslim Brotherhood, but he didn’t seem worried about the theory.

Fakuos met Hanna when she and her family went to church in Des Moines. The two recently started dating and just told her parents; something she had been nervous at first to do.

Fakuos and her family are from Asyut, Egypt, where her grandmother, three aunts, and one uncle still live. She has another uncle who lives in Cairo where the family owns and operates a gold store.

Similar to Hanna’s story, Fakuos’s relatives had to transfer everything in their store into their own apartment and protect their apartment building from being thieved.

Fakuos attended a private school, but she and her family were discriminated against for being Christian in a largely Muslim-based country.

“It’s worse than a scary movie,” she said.

Fakuos was worried when she heard about the New Year’s Eve bombing at a Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt.

After learning that former police chief Habib Al-Adli had been accused of possibly running the operation, Fakuos felt that the Mubarak administration might have planned the attack so that Christians could blame Muslims and vice versa. It would distract the Egyptian people so they wouldn’t see what was going on within the government.

Even with the fear she lived with in Egypt, Fakuos immensely misses her first-floor apartment with the small balcony, but wishes she and her family could have had the freedom they now have in America.

“If you say your opinion [in Egypt],” Fakuos said, “God only knows what’ll happen. I support these people in Egypt and I hope they fight for that and make sure that it happens — nothing else.

“I just want to tell all Egyptians, ‘Good for you and sorry I wasn’t there to stand with you.'”

Hope for tomorrow

Hanna’s Facebook page is filled with statuses about the new direction Egypt must go in; how Mubarak should leave immediately in order for the country to move on.

His profile picture isn’t a picture of him but a pair of pliers pulling a nail with Mubarak’s face on the head out of the ground with dead trees all around but white doves flying above.

A couple people wrote on his wall about what’s really going on in Egypt or what the next plan of action will be, but he said Egypt isn’t thinking about what’s going to happen tomorrow.

“We were deprived democracy our whole lives,” Hanna said. “Democracy is new to us. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. [I’m] just hoping it doesn’t fade away.”