Every journey leaves a different mark on me. Some trips end with beautiful photographs and passing memories. Others send me back with new questions about ourselves and the world. For me, travel has never been merely a movement across geography. It has always been another way of learning, and a chance to test ideas beyond the borders in which they were first formed.
I once wrote that I had seen the world from both sides. It was the title of one of my books, but it was also a description of a long personal and professional experience. I studied science, then the humanities. I worked in journalism and academia, in the private and public sectors, and experienced both executive and legislative institutions. I came close to opposition politics, and later to government. These different paths did not give me final answers, but they gave me a wider ability to look at things from more than one angle.
Over the past years, I have travelled extensively and found in some countries something close to a mirror that helps us understand ourselves. Germany, for example, left a deep impression on me, not only because of its economic strength or administrative discipline, but because it is a country that knows how to turn memory into an institution, and historical experience into public awareness. The United States, meanwhile, has remained for me a particularly rich space for understanding the relationship between the individual and the institution, between talent and opportunity, and between personal ambition and the wider environment that allows such ambition to grow.
This is why I return to New York this month for two weeks. It will be my sixth or perhaps seventh visit to the city, but this time the journey brings together several threads: my old passion for travel and travel writing, my journalistic work, and my growing interest in what I often call the “governance of meaning”. I want to understand how societies produce their stories of success, how they choose their inspiring models, and how an individual biography can become a broader lesson in administration, culture, and institutions.
During this visit, I plan to conduct a series of conversations and interviews with Egyptians and Egyptian-Americans who have succeeded in universities, research centres, professional institutions, and other fields of work. I am interested in their personal stories, of course, but I am even more interested in the environment that made such success possible. Talent alone is rarely enough. A good seed needs suitable soil, water, light, and a safe space in which to grow. Without these conditions, the seed may retain its quality, yet fail to flourish.
Many Egyptians who have achieved remarkable success abroad were not born with abilities fundamentally different from those of their peers at home. The more important difference often lies in institutions: in the clarity of rules, fairness of evaluation, respect for time, protection of initiative, and the ability to turn individual effort into a stable professional path. These are not minor administrative details. They are the difference between a society that consumes its talent and one that knows how to invest in it.
I am not interested in an easy comparison between Egypt and the United States, nor in the lazy habit of glorifying the outside world or condemning our own reality. What interests me is understanding. We do not move forward by praising ourselves without scrutiny, or by attacking our reality without fairness. We move forward when we have the quiet courage to place experience on the table of analysis: what worked, what failed, what can be transferred, and what needs a different context in order to function.
Two weeks in New York may not be enough to understand a city of such scale, or a society of such complexity. But they are enough to catch the threads of stories worth telling. Between interviews, long walks, and careful observation of people and institutions, I will try to write about Egyptians who carried with them a part of their homeland, then reshaped that part within a new environment.
Perhaps this project will become a chapter in a wider book I have been carrying in my mind for years: a book about how I see the world through travel, experience, and encounters with institutions. Travel, at its core, is not a departure from one’s homeland, but a return to it by a longer route. We see others, and then we see ourselves more clearly. We discover what we have, what we lack, and what we can change when we treat success and failure as outcomes that can be understood, rather than sealed destinies.
From New York, I will try to search for this space in particular: the space in which the Egyptian individual stands between an original memory and a new opportunity, between old roots and institutions that have rearranged the path ahead. In that space, we may find more than the story of a successful immigrant. We may find a small lesson in the meaning of the state, the meaning of institutions, and the meaning of giving talent a fair chance to become added value, rather than wasted energy.
Dr Ramy Galal is a governance and institutional reform specialist focusing on state capacity, accountability, and the design of effective public institutions, with an interest in the governance of meaning.