Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • revolution makers
Egyptians drove the revolt that pushed President Hosni Mubarak from office,
and other crowds have shaken the streets of Sanaa, Algiers, and Amman.
Rather than the Arab world’s usual suspects—bearded Islamists or
jaded leftists—it is young people, angry at the lack of economic opportunity
available to them, who are risking their lives going up against police forces.
It’s no coincidence, the young people of Sidi Bouzid told me, that the
public uprisings surging across the Middle East and North Africa started
here.
“Every day, my mother tells me go look for a job, why don’t you get a job,
get a job,” said Sofiene Dhouibi, 24, when we met in January in Sidi Bouzid.
“But I know there is no job.”
“I look. Really, I look. But there is no job,’’ he added, so instead he spends
his days doing something so common among North Africa’s unemployed
that it has earned its own trade name—the hittistes, meaning, in Arabic
slang, those who lean up against the wall.
The oldest of three children, the son of an ambulance driver and a mother
who makes spare cash selling olives from the family’s groves, Dhouibi
spent one-third of his family’s monthly income of $210 each month for four
years to earn a university degree. When the degree failed to land him a job,
his parents doubled down and sent him to school for another two years, for
a master’s in computer technology.
Now two years on the job market with no job, Dhouibi—polite, earnest,
thoughtful, and fluent in three languages—spends his morning with other
unemployed high school and college graduates at the stand-up tables in Sidi
Bouzid’s Café Charlotte. He nurses a coffee, thanks to the change his mother
gives him from her olive sales. He goes home for lunch, visits an Internet
cafe in the afternoon, returns home for dinner, sleeps in a room with his
brother, and wakes, hopeless, in the morning to do it all again.
“Imagine your life going on like this,” he said at the Café Charlotte, standing
over the coffee that was the treat of his day. “Every day the same.”
When Bouazizi, a hard-working fruit-seller sent into a blind rage by a
bribe-seeking policewoman who confiscated his wares and slapped him,
immolated himself on Dec. 17, Dhouibi was there for the first of the demonstrations
that followed.
His best friend, a newly graduated mechanical engineer with better fam-
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