Five days of upheaval

When Robert Joyce ’13 watched a CNN broadcast about the revolution in Egypt two weeks ago, he laughed. Joyce, who was studying abroad at Alexandria University in Egypt at the time, could hear bullets outside his dorm as the TV reported “peaceful protests and isolated violence.”

“It was really funny for us to watch CNN, to hear about the power of Twitter in this revolution when Internet had been lost for a week,” Joyce said. “The situation on the ground was different from what was being reported.”

Joyce, who is also a member of The Daily Princetonian Editorial Board, was in Egypt from Jan. 8 to Feb. 1 with a Middlebury College study-abroad program. The University assisted in the evacuation of four Wilson School majors who were also in Egypt and was aware that Joyce was studying in the country, he said. The Middlebury program arranged for Joyce's evacuation, though the University did contact him before it had been arranged.

Joyce explained that the danger began to escalate on Friday, Jan. 28, and students were told to stay indoors. But that day, he and a friend left the dorms to see the protests in the streets.

“At the protests, we were teargassed by the police, we saw the police attack the protestors, we heard live ammunition, we heard rubber bullets, we saw trucks trying to hit the protestors and we saw protestors stop the trucks and light them on fire,” Joyce said. “By the end of the day, the biggest police station was up in flames.”

On Friday night, gunshots all around the dorm kept Joyce awake for hours. The next day, he was told that the guards who had protected the dorms from gunfire the night before were leaving. He and the other students were quickly evacuated to an apartment in Alexandria.

“The streets were empty except for a militia formed by people with sticks, pipes, whatever they had, to protect the block from the armed security forces,” Joyce said. “We heard gunshots close to the block every hour for the next 18 hours.”

Ignoring a student curfew, Joyce joined the militia with around 100 to 150 locals to help protect the block, which housed mostly middle class families.

All night, Joyce and the militia chased out cars carrying groups of armed men to protect the apartment buildings.

“The people’s entire government had abandoned them, and all the people meant to protect them had turned on them,” Joyce said. “But they didn’t buckle or resort to lawlessness or chaos; they banded together and protected their livelihood.”

On Sunday morning, Joyce was told to wait outside his apartment for 20 to 40 minutes for a car that would take him and other students to the airport for evacuation out of Egypt. But three-and-a-half hours later, no car had appeared.

The assistant head of the program then flagged down a bus in the street so Joyce and other evacuees could catch their plane.

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At the airport, Joyce and the other students waited 12 hours without any sign of the plane they had been promised. Finally they began making calls to the U.S. government and press.

“It was really scary because we called the Embassy and State Department in Washington, and they told us to check our e-mail for evacuation plans to get out of the country, but there had been no Internet in the country for a week,” Joyce said. “The government’s sluggish response in getting citizens off the ground was not helpful, and for a while we felt totally abandoned by everybody.”

After 36 hours of waiting in the airport, a plane arrived and carried Joyce and the others to Prague.

Now back in the United States, Joyce recently met with the University to go over his options for the rest of the school year. He said he plans to fly to Morocco where he will study for the semester.

“A lot of what I learned in Egypt has to do with how to think about the theoretical types of terms you throw out when you’re writing a politics paper, like ‘social upheaval,’” Joyce said. “It’s one thing to think about those terms theoretically and another to think about them when you’re getting teargassed; they have a new meaning now.”

Correction

The original version of this article incorrectly implied that the University did not contact Joyce prior to his learning of the evacuation plans. This article has been updated to reflect the changes.