EGYPT: Nation’s first female mayor gets used being ‘part of history’

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Her father’s chair sits beneath the window to catch the morning light, where he once held court with villagers who wanted him to discipline their sons, chase away thieves and settle land and dowry disputes on the lush fields between the Nile and the desert’s edge.

She eases into the high-back chair with the worn wooden armrests. A single woman of 53 wearing faded jeans and a pink blouse, her dark hair uncovered, she has her late father’s spirit and wisdom, though she has decided not to spank misbehaving children and, truth be told, she’d rather not know all the whispered sins and untidy dramas of her friends and neighbors in this brick-and-mud smudge of a village founded by an ancestor.

Few would have expected this place of millstones and poultry dealers to claim the ‘first’ of anything. It’s there, though, in a picture frame: Eva Habil Kyrolos smiling and standing next to President Hosni Mubarak on the day she became Egypt’s first female mayor. It hangs near photographs of her grandfather, whose brow seems cut from stone, and her father, a scrubbed-faced raconteur in a turban.

‘I am part of history now. I am under the spotlight,’ said Kyrolos, sitting in her receiving room the other day in her village of Komboha. Read more.

Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo