Community Corner

Windsor High Graduate Evacuated From Egyptian Unrest

Windsor High School graduate Christopher Roman found himself in the midst of a revolution while studying abroad in Alexandria, Egypt. Roman was evacuated and returned to U.S. soil on Feb. 3.

On the night of Jan. 29, Christopher Roman stood on the roof of his apartment building. Below him, the streets filled with men of all ages, their hands clutching knives, shotguns, metal pipes, anything that could be used for protection. The sound of gunshots rang in the distance as he watched the men below scurry back and forth between their homes and the sound of gunfire. He was a long way from home.

Just nine days earlier, the 20-year-old Windsor native arrived in Egypt to embark on a semester-long immersion into Middle Eastern studies and the Arabic language at Alexandria University.

 Studying abroad is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most, but Roman did not know just how rare his brief stay in the North African nation would be.

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Following a successful revolution in Tunisia, journalists around the world turned their attention to Egypt as rights activists claimed to have been inspired by Tunisians’ fight against government corruption. Soon after, Egyptians’ frustrations with the incumbent regime came to a head as Roman walked the streets of Cairo, touring the Egyptian capital before heading north to Alexandria. Thousands of Egyptians took to Cairo’s streets that day, demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled the nation for nearly 30 years.

The protests on that day, Roman said, had yet to escalate to the scale of a full revolution.

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“I think the worst that we were faced with was that some of the streets were closed down and there was more traffic, and anyone who has been to Egypt knows that traffic is already unbelievable,” he said.

“We did see, at one point, a clash between some protesters and some police that were throwing rocks at each other, but that was the worst that we saw in Cairo...”

It wasn’t until Roman’s arrival in Alexandria that demonstrations became a revolution, and he stood witnessing what became known as “the Day of Rage.”

Walking along Alexandria’s famed road that runs along the city’s eastern harbor, the Corniche, Roman caught sight of a precursor to the intense revolt to come.

“I was walking around with a bunch of guys and we were going around the city… and we could see this smoke coming from far off… We asked some Egyptians that we saw walking past and they said, nonchalantly, ‘Oh, that’s burning cars. The protest is down there, they’re burning government vehicles,’” he said.

As plumes of smoke bellowed in the distance, Roman saw the mood of Egyptians around him hasten.

“We knew that something was up,” he said. “We couldn’t get a taxi, they were all full of people going down to the protest. There were also these mini buses, a very common form of transportation in Egypt. [They] were full to capacity and there were people hanging out of the doors, hanging on the back of the van, and sitting on top.

“One of them passed by and we could see that one of the men had a police riot shield that they must have stolen from when [the protesters] overran the cops or the security forces.”

Unlike the Egyptian military, Roman explained, the police and security forces are seen by the Egyptian people as “tools of the Egyptian government, symbols of repression and torture.”

“So [police and security forces] were the targets,” he said. “There were a lot of police stations being burned down.”

That night, “the Day of Rage,” the protesters “basically overran the security forces and the police. So the next day, there were no police in the entire city,” Roman explained.

As intense as the protests became, Roman would begin to notice something the next morning that left a far greater impression on him than the violence that surrounded.

As he walked around the city the next morning to learn more about what had occurred on “the Day of Rage,” Roman saw young Egyptian men, the same age as him, working together to fill the void of the police that they ran out of the city only hours earlier.

“It was very inspiring. All of the Egyptian people came together,” he recalled.

“We saw the Egyptian young men… they couldn’t have been much older than I am, in normal clothes — jeans or business suits — out in the middle of the street directing traffic, which we all thought was mind-boggling because the traffic in an Egyptian city is just awful, and the traffic was going more smoothly with these guys than it was [when being directed by police]

“And they were organizing all of this without the use of the internet or cell phones.”

To combat the progress of the protesters, the Egyptian government shut down the internet and cell phone networks.

While the tactic proved ineffective in interrupting protesters’ ability to communicate with one another, it sent shockwaves of concern that resonated across the Atlantic to Roman’s family’s home here in Windsor.

With their son half-way across the globe in a nation engulfed in revolutionary violence, Roman’s parents were on edge.

“The fact that we had no contact with Christopher was very scary,” said Roman’s mother, Susan Roman.

Between Susan Roman and her husband, William, they tried to do everything in their power to get in touch with him and get him home safely.

“Between the two of us, we called contacts from the C.I.A., the Department of Defense, State Department, I sent e-mails to [Senator Joe] Lieberman, [Secretary of State Hilary] Clinton, Butler University. We knew nothing that we were doing was going to change anything but it didn’t seem acceptable to just sit and wait,” Susan Roman said.

Christopher Roman planned to have used Skype to keep in contact with his family, something he used last year when he traveled to China. With the internet down, and cell phone service touch and go, it was difficult to ensure his parents of his safety.

At 4 a.m., the morning after “the Day of Rage,” Roman got in touch with his father.

“I was just telling him that we were OK… My dad didn’t really want to show [his concern]; he didn’t want to make me scared or anything, but I could hear his voice quivering when I was on the phone with him.”

Without the presence of police forces, the city, particularly Roman’s neighborhood, which he described as “pretty upscale,” fell subject to looters and escaped criminals. As he stood on his roof, watching the me of the neighborhood take up makeshift arms to protect their property and families, he never feared for his own safety. His building was being protected by those very men.

“We had a guy coming into our building, going up and down the stairs, carrying stuff to barricade the bottom floor. They literally barricaded the stairs on the first floor to keep people out,” he said.

“We went down later to see what was going on and at they barricade they had put a few metal poles (to be used as spears) to defend the barricade and they put a couple of Molotov cocktails with a lighter. We saw that and thought ‘Omigod, what is going on?’”

Part two of Christopher Roman's epxerience in Egypt, including details of his evacutation, will run tomorrow, Tues., Feb. 8.


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