Dr. Mamduh from the Ministry of Health AIDS Hotline in Cairo tries to be encouraging. Ask whatever you want, the call is not recorded. Everything remains anonymous. Another long moment of silence before the caller finally plucks up the courage to speak. Since the establishment of the Cairo Hotline in September 1996, the telephone number, which is advertised on public buses, in metro stations and in newspapers, has been called 17,000 times.
Calls come in from all provinces of Egypt.
He got the idea during a trip to the US and Britain. Back in Egypt, he turned his phone at the Ministry of Health into an anonymous counseling service, which was so successful that Al-Sayyed was soon overburdened with calls to his office. All of these issues rank at the top of the list of taboos in a conservative society. It is the young age of the callers that Al-Sayyed and his team find encouraging. In seminars with students at Cairo University, they try to provide a basic AIDS education-hardly an easy task.