When I see this photo, I recall strong feelings of some parts of my early life, i.e. up to the age of 11-12 years, or so. It is difficult to retrieve all the details of this period of childhood. The memory or the brain as such either had not developed enough to organize, sort all events, one by one and structure them in coherent series of events or there were no physical objects for every separate event that such events could be associated with. This can be also related to, that the brain was still in the process of development and therefore all events could not be easily available. Whatever the reasons were, formulation of the details of my early childhood would be limited to some separated and scattered memories.

So, as a matter of fact I do not remember everything on daily basis, as day by day events. However, I can only reflect in general terms how I and my own environments (home and family, school and free time) interacted together and with each other. This bunch of young kinds in the photo was among very few things I (the person far to the right) remember from my early childhood. As went to school all of us, we could only spend the summer holidays together and whenever we were allowed to spend sometime outside the walls of our houses. The area we were living in had no gardens and no special playing places for children, so we were left to own judgement to select among available children in our age, i.e. from the very near houses to us, one or two at most. Indeed, that worked out fairly good in my case and I do have very good reflections and memories with these bunch of young kids. My younger brother Mourad was always with us but he was the most quite of us all, he is the second to the left in the photo. The first to the left, Saeed, was our leader “the boss” and was always ready to defend all of us and could find smart ways to manage our group in difficult times, i.e. when we run in trouble as in few some cases when we behaved in “wayward” manner. Otherwise we had traditional street games, mini-football, jump rope, “hide and find”, rope competition, ……. . Later on, when I searched the group, I find him “Saeed” a polis officer in Port-Said, I was not surprised when I visited him as he managed the school, joined and graduated from the Polis High School in Cairo.  The one in the middle of the photo is Abou Zead, he was like all of us ready to share his free time, in frictions-free fashion and above all easy going, as we could alway be in agreement. The one next to me “Abbas”, more darker than us, was ready to do as we did. As far as I remember after we all became friends, i.e. getting over introductory conflicts, checks and acceptance from our parents, we had very nice time and fun together. My brother Mourad which I will tell more about later on, became a high ranked military engineering officer “radar specialist” in the Egyptian Army. The other two Abou Zead and Abbas, I lost track with them and I do not know anything about them.

Follow my story, in separate parts I will uncover more and more about myself and my journey in life.