- Each time the police entered the housing complex, my thoughts flashed back to all the times when police beat me, threatened to kill me, and told me my death would be meaningless.
I had to remind myself that I was no longer in Cairo, where Egyptian police had once arrested me on charges of “masterminding the Egyptian Revolution.” I was a refugee working for minimum wage as a desk clerk in a San Francisco housing complex. The apartment building was a single room occupancy in a tough neighborhood called the Tenderloin, and our cameras regularly filmed robberies and stabbings that the police came to investigate.
Whenever I saw the police, it reminded me of the decade I spent fighting to free Egypt, my country, from a police state. I had been a democracy activist since 2004, when I stood in downtown Cairo with 300 protesters and signs that demanded an end to corruption and the rule of Hosni Mubarak, the dictator who ruled Egypt for three decades.