It has been the habit for every TED and TEDx speaker,
to come on the stage and talk about their big ideas.
But today I'll be doing the exact opposite.
Today I will tell you about my small idea.
But before I share with you my story, I would like to provide you
with a little bit of context about the place where I come from.
My country, Egypt, has been the central attention of the
whole world, last year.
Most probably you've seen pictures like...this...
..and this...
And I believe that most of you were truly inspired
by what we have done.
Like the hope and faith you have witnessed
in the young Egyptian's eyes.
And the will and persistance
(unclear)
But this is, by no means, my whole story.
This is just one chapter of a 30 year long story.
Not long ago, things were really different...
...and I mean really different.
The future couldn't look any darker for us
An endemic state of learned helplessness sucked the hope out of our souls.
It seemed at one point that no matter what we do
nothing will ever change.
We used to live in a state where the police main role
wasn't to protect us, the people, but only to
protect the people in power.
Scenes like these didn't surprise us much...
and almost every single Egyptian knew either directly
or indirectly, someone who was tortured, humiliated or
even disappeared from the face of Earth...
...vanished, if we put it in old wise words.
But a decade ago, something strange has happened
when a small series of random initiatives and movements
took place. This was so inexplicable and it was
so unfamiliar to the unspoken agreement of silence
between Egyptians.
In 2004, a small group of Egyptians from diverse backgrounds
decided to take the street and protest,
all united behind the word "enough".
Enough humiliation, enough corruption, enough injustice...
...and in 2008, another group of young Egyptians
decided to support an unheard about labour strike in
one of the Egyptian cities...
They went to the street and protested. And all
that they were trying to do was to raise the public
awareness about such strikes.
In the year 2010, we witnessed the come back of the
former chief of International Atomic Agency,
Mohamed ElBaradei, to his own country.
He came back with a clear agenda and a call for change,
that he tried to unite Egyptians behind.
And the list goes on...
Numerous, small, random movements, not only restricted
to politics and economics, but covering many different
disciplines: health, education, development and many more.
But all of these movements seemed so small...
so much that the public perceived them to be too small
to ever get big.
And it seems that the old regim also agreed on this,
and this was the reason why they let them be
even though they were explicitly challenging the status quo.
And in fact they were used as a living proof of how "democratic"
our old state was.
Around the same time, our small idea also started,
when me and three of my friends stumbled upon this
well of education and inspiration called TED.
It simply ignited the passion of learning inside of us.
And even though it made us believe that we are hundreds
of light years behind,
in the same tame, the knowledge and access to knowledge
blew our minds away.
This is when we've heard about the initiative of TEDx,
the possibility of organizing our own TED like event.
And we instantly without any thoughts,
applied for the license of organizing the first
TEDx Cairo event.
To our surprise, we were granted the license in less than 2 days,
but the decision to organize TEDx Cairo brought
so many challenged with it.
Starting from the fact that we had little to no experience
in doing events, neither we were connected to some people
who could help us,
to the fact that organizing or doing anything American
in overwhelmingly anti-American society,
just brought too much hostility and hatred you know...
But these challenges where nothing when compared to
the risk of organizing a progressive forward thinking
conference that aims at spreading worthy ideas
and inspires peoples' minds to thinks and act in a such
thought-controlling regim, like the one we had.
It seems that the old regim's main strategic goal was just to
keep the nations collective mind in either an ideal state or
always preoccupied with basic survival issues.
We were so scared that one dat we will be taken away.
At one point, we became so paranoid that we decided
to always keep Google Latitude turned on, on our mobiles.
In case we would disappear, then our families would know
where we were.
But these obstacles didn't succeed in putting off
our passion, our motivation to create a community where people
can come together and celebrate the power of ideas
was enough to keep us going.
In our 2 years of TEDx Cairo journey we have experienced so
many different feelings...
Lots of "ups", lots of "downs", lots of failure and success.
And they were, of course, these moments when we
almost lost our faith...
when we almost gave up. It seemed that no matter what
we would do, it wouldn't make any difference at the end.
But on the other side of the spectrum, there were also
these moments that were enough to reunite our passions.
I still remember that day after one of our events,
when an attendee commented on a post we shared by saying
"It was such a great event, that
I love Egypt more because of you".
Or that random sms I got at midnight from one of our speakers saying
"Thanks TEDx Cairo for making my son proud of me."
These little differences, made the biggest difference for us.
But there was one moment when I couldn't have been
more proud of what I was doing.
When I got an e-mail from someone I don't even know,
sharing with me his story.
He said that he watched one of our TEDx Cairo talks
where in which the speaker was talking about a new
technology he has come up with and was trying to use it to
help autistic children. He told me that he had a little
baby autistic sister, but never loved her.
He always ignored her and he was always embarrassed
of her condition.
Well they told me that after viewing the talk,
he was so inspired by how someone can genuinely care
about these children, that he decided himself to start
caring about his sister and to spend more time with her.
He ended the e-mail with a little paragraph that I would
like to share with you.
"I never loved my sister that much. But now, whenever she
sees me she smiles. She never did this before until we spent
more time together in front of my PC trying to help her learn.
Now I just adore her smile. She is a gift.
On the 25th of January 2011, the people who started what was perceived to be trivial and useless,
where the same ones leading the whole nation towards achieving what we thought to be unachievable.
And in retrospect I can see now that TEDx Cairo was just a little tiny piece of this pattern,
a pattern in which the small and seemingly insignificant was destined to meet an unexpected future.
Today, TEDx Cairo has succeeded to become the biggest TEDx community in the world
with more than 60.000 fans and followers and inspiring more than a million viewers for our published talks
and igniting millions and millions of conversations.
I have learned so many lessons in my TEDx Cairo journey.
But if there is only one lesson that I am really grateful for learning,
then it is definitely that it doesn't matter how small my idea is, cause at the end what really matters
is how big it might become...
Thank you.