La dolce vita

I came back home from Roma today. I left Cairo on Sunday afternoon carrying 200 copies of the PAP book with me. I was travelling with eng. Benevento, former Director of the Italian Cooperation office in Cairo. On the flight to Italy, Alitalia was pleased to offer me a snack: turkey roll, salmon, cake and fruit salad. When we arrived in Rome we found a driver who drove us to our hotel. Guess what! A 5 stars L hotel, in the heart of the Capitale. When I went up in my room I checked the price and almost had a heart attack, before realizing that I was not supposed to pay for the room myself: it costed more than 500 euros per night. I enjoyed having a shower and wearing an elegant bathrobe and elegant white slippers, offered by the hotel. Then, I went out for dinner with some of the other participants at the conference, and finally started talking about how to fight poverty through microfinance, basically, the main topic of the conference we were about to follow and, for most of us, our job. I went back to my five stars hotel room quite early that night because I was quite tired and I could not stop thinking about the discrepancy between our conversations on poverty alleviation and the luxury that was surrounding us. Anyway, when I went back to the hotel I called the room service to order a cup of tea, for which I spent 10 euros. You know what occurred to me? If the average Egyptian earns around 150 pounds per month, the amount I spent for a cup of tea was about 70 pounds, that means that I spent half the monthly salary of a low income family in Egypt in a single cup of tea...mmhh...
The Euro mediterranean conference on microcredit organized by the Italian committee for 2005 Year of microcredit has been quite interesting though. I met tons of interesting people, met old friends from the Master in microfinance and also the Master in Insurance and Previdence (yes, I basically have two Masters, poor me) and also my lovely brother Max (no link, check picture).
In the flight back to Cairo, Alitalia was pleased to offer me a snack: turkey roll, salmon, cake, fruit salad..hey, I tasted this stuff before (and I didn't get that crazy about it...)!!!!!!!
I came back with a lot of business cards in my wallet from all over the world (from Bangladesh to the US), a better knowledge of the state of microfinance nowadays and also a bit of pride for having spoken languages that I was not using since God knows when ... and look at what my cat does in my suitcase!!!