“Pardon the men cannot live here .. The village is for divorced and widowed women only,” is an unwritten condition to live in the Upper Egyptian village ‘Al Samaha’, located in Edfu, which is 120 km away from Aswan. Here, in Upper Egypt, a number of women are partaking in a new experience, where they step away from society in isolation to avoid the social stigma and cultural perception that comes with being divorced and widowed. The women wake up early in the morning with their axes on their shoulders irrigating the land, raising cattle, harvesting crops and carrying their arms in the evening to protect their children. This project was launched by the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture in 1998 for single mothers widowed or divorced, said Hamdi El Kashef, the village’s general superintendent, in an interview with Al Arabiya, adding that only 303 women and their children, not men, live in the village. If any son gets married, he is taken out of the village. Nabil Rashid, technical director of the World Food Project, and the first to oversee the village, told Sputnik that the idea belonged to the…
