…. can, unsurprisingly, really hurt those who happen to be neither God nor in Power. AL Monitor‘s Mohannad Sabry reports in September of 2013 on the plight of St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai region of Egypt, which was ordered, with little reason and no compensation, to shut down by security officials:
“Despite having more time to pray and practice, our priests live without crowds of visitors, we are suffering a major financial crisis, and we cannot cover the monastery’s expenses and dozens of families that we constantly support,” said Paolos, who wore his farming clothes covered in mud.
St. Catherine’s Monastery employs 400 workers from the surrounding community at its olive groves, grape farms, honey bee farms and several processing facilities including an olive oil press. As of the beginning of September, the monastery reserves decreased to a level that is barely enough to cover two months of expenditure.
“We respect the Egyptian government, and we will continue to close if they require the closure,” said Paolos, “But we will have to drastically cut down salaries and other expenditures. We are saddened to lose the income we shared with the Bedouin community.”
Meanwhile, the state authorities haven’t moved to help rescue the ailing community despite generating millions of dollars in revenues from hundreds of thousands of tourists who have visited St. Catherine’s over the past two decades.
One example of the income generated by the state is the entrance tickets imposed by the Ministry of Environment in 2004. Since then, every single tourist is required to pay $5 to enter the town of St. Catherine’s.
The monastery’s administration told Al-Monitor that it operated at full capacity between 2004 and 2011, receiving 4,000 visitors — mostly foreign tourists — five days a week. And even on the monastery’s days off, the town received hundreds of tourists climbing Mount Sinai and venturing around the mountains on Bedouin safari trips.
The local Bedouins offered camel rides and other camel based services, and were selling their camels to feed their camels – which they acknowledge was a disaster and, when the closedown would be lifted, would leave them without the ability to generate their former incomes.
Credit: Wikipedia
I wonder who benefited from it – at the ruinous expense of the occupants of St. Catherine’s. I have not tried to discover if the security-ordered shutdown was ever lifted, because I find this oddly to be an object lesson of what happens when man, rather than law, is in charge. With strength can easily come corruption, and Trump’s history with “justice” is such that I don’t doubt he’d immediately be manipulating the system for his betterment.
Oh, hurry up, election. I want to stop thinking about this bad joke of a nominee. “Presumptive nominee.”
