said i wouldn't update

I had decided not to update this blog anymore, but I was wrong.

I'm here, by the River Jordan, living in Jerusalem, and monitoring closely what's happening on our neighboring river, the Nile. Heard of it?

Read this, from the New York Times:

Another Times colleague, Rob Harris, a video producer, has sent us this account of his encounter with the Egyptian police soon after he arrived in Cairo on Saturday:

When I flew into Cairo Airport my video camera was confiscated by customs. The customs official told me that I was welcome to take it into the country, if I paid the $90,000 duty. He put my camera in a storage room on a shelf lined with about thirty other confiscated cameras.

By the time I left the airport, it was dark and past curfew. Mohamed, The Times’ trusted driver, was waiting to take me to the bureau in his S.U.V.

I was about to be shot at for the first time.

He took us the long away around on the highway to try and avoid the countless roadblocks thrown up by men protecting their neighborhoods at night. A colleague who arrived at the airport a week earlier, said he had to talk his way through thirty on his way through town.

But a few miles down the road, the army blocked off the highway and we were forced to take to the streets in a neighborhood not familiar to Mohamed.

After fifteen minutes of negotiating our way through rutted roads and stopping to ask directions, we hit the first road block, a group of young men with sticks and a rusty police barricade blocking half the road. Muhammad skillfully cut through the traffic and whizzed by. The guards barely noticing he had cut the line.

The next roadblock was manned by four children. They shouted and waved their arms as we passed without stopping. “Crazy,” Mohamed chuckled.

Mohamed thought he had figured out how to get us back on the highway, across the bridge to the side of town where he said everyone knew him and the roadblocks would not be a problem. But the army had blocked off the right turn he wanted to make. Soldiers pointed us toward the neighborhood called Rhode el Farag.

We approached another roadblock. Mohamed rolled down his window and the men peered in. Some noticed I was a foreigner. They didn’t make any immediate demands, so Muhammad started driving away.

“Stop! Stop!” one man yelled, but Mohamed kept going. A motor scooter took off after us. Then gunshots cracked behind us. Mohamed sped up, but we ran straight into another roadblock, a few hundred yards past the first. A large group quickly surrounded the S.U.V., one man banged a sheathed scimitar on the hood. A slender man in a gray tracksuit and tight curly hair opened my door and motioned for me to get out. Others opened the back seat and started opening my bags and rummaging through.

“Maybe he’s a spy,” said one. “Try and find the gun,” said another, apparently thinking we had fired the shots.

Mohamed showed him his Egyptian ID. They demanded my passport. When I gave them a photocopy, they got agitated, so I gave them the real thing and my New York Times identification. Mohamed tried desperately to explain our situation, and not speaking Arabic, I clicked an imaginary camera with my hands and repeated, “Journalist! Journalist!”

After several tense minutes, a policeman arrived and cooler heads in the crowd prevailed. The man in the track suit, who by know believed I was indeed a journalist, jumped in the back seat of our car with a heavy set partner, crushing the camera gear not confiscated by customs. “I’m sorry,” he said in English, “everything is OK. We save your life now.”

He directed us to the local police station, Abu Rhode el Farag, where the policeman was waiting to guide us into the low slung cinderblock building, through a large group gathered around our car.

The walls on the inside of the station were splattered with purple paint, like someone had come in and thrown buckets of it around.

Mohamed continued to argue our case with the police officer, who assured us everything would be fine. The policeman led us into the office of the local commander, a middle aged balding man in a leather coat hunched over his desk, a cigarette dangling between his fingers. We sat down and he offered me a bottle of water. Four other men sat around the periphery of the room. Some in police uniforms, some not.

The officer eyed us, then our identification. My passport stamp proved I had indeed arrived in the country only hours before. He listened patiently as Mohamed explained how we had gotten into this situation. The Times bureau called on Mohamed’s cellular phone. The commander motioned for Mohamed to answer it, then spoke with the bureau office manager himself.

After hanging up, he leaned over to a colleague next to him and they muttered to each other, pointing at my passport. Then he handed it to me and offered his hand. “Welcome to Egypt,” he said.

What a welcome.