I was a sub-editor at Al-Ahram Weekly when the then editor-in-chief, Hosni Guindi, called me into his office and told me that his counterpart at Watani was looking for a part-time copy-editor for its fledging English-language edition.
I was a sub-editor at Al-Ahram Weekly when the then editor-in-chief, Hosni Guindi, called me into his office and told me that his counterpart at Watani was looking for a part-time copy-editor for its fledging English-language edition. He suggested that I might fit this in around my hours at the Weekly.
I joined the Watani team in December 2000, two months before the first issue was published. It was not the first time I had worked on a brand new, pre-production newspaper, and again I found it very exciting. We were working on suitable articles and laying out mock copies; My job was to tidy the copy, and this I have done with great pleasure ever since. As we are a weekly paper and the articles often come to me well in advance, I rarely miss a publication. This means that in all this time I have taken only two or three weeks off, mainly when I have been travelling in the Western Desert with no Internet connection!
It has been a great joy to work with my friends at Watani over the years, and I’m sure they are used to my acerbic comments, usually added to the text in bold italics, reminding the translators to revise their prepositions . We have run some interesting articles—I especially enjoyed the series Tracing the People’s History by the late Erian Hanna—and we have seen Watani International go from strength to strength. When I meet Copts abroad I always mention that I wok for Watani, and am happy to say that I have never met an emigrant Copt who does not read, enjoy and appreciate the paper.
