In the context of the responses to the articles of the Holy Family Journey to Egypt, I publish today an article by Samuel Iskandar, archeologist. He says:
The majority of the peoples of the world seek reasons to develop their countries, but we insist or love backwardness. We see the civilized world using any event or monument to make the best of it. They may lack many elements of urbanization and progress, but their people work hard to achieve such development. On the other hand, we have a lot of monuments, but with our negligence and foolishness, we waste many opportunities to success. Unfortunately, this is our reality since we indeed lose many opportunities by bad management and wrong or no planning.
Couple of years ago, we celebrated news about the inclusion of the Holy Family path in Egypt as part of the pilgrimage program of the Vatican. Many people felt good, especially under the bad situation of truism industry in Egypt for several years. The news disappeared and people started to forget about this fantastic project.
We didn t use this opportunity after some people of specialization said that religious tourism is useless and the cost of spending on them is only a waste of public money, as if they did not know that the number of visitors of this tourism is more than a hundred million tourists each year.
Bad vision and planning always lead to such bad situation where opportunities are lost along with profit. We can also face extremism using this kind of tourism in the only country that was visited by the Holy Family outside of the Holy Land.
Many writers have written about the importance of this tourism including Suleiman Shafiq who through several articles described its importance and value. We have been granted a heavenly blessing, but we don t know how to use it leading our country from bad situation to worse.
