The EMSA Story

Our story begins as a typical epic tale. Combine the Godfather trilogy, the Nightmare Before Christmas, Schindler’s List and a classic Disney “dream come true” feature, and you might get an idea of our history. Your other alternative is to have some good imagination and read along our story.

1968: The general morality of the Egyptian population is at its worst: Egypt has just had a tragic occupation of a big portion of its land and politics are driving Egyptian youth towards general frustration. Hence, developed the need of “distraction”. A group of ambitious medical students from Cairo University decided to do something other than sinking into depression and took the necessary steps towards creating a students scientific association inside their faculty that would be able to contribute in the medical students development as a non-profit, non-political body.

1972: Those fresh spirited medical students, challenged by the idea of creating the ultimate working environment for all medical students in Egypt, decided to nourish their will to realize their goal of a productive medical student in a global environment by involving other faculties and becoming a national body using democracy as a way to organize their work.

This organization created great leaders that managed to make their experiences in the students’ association the building stones of totally new personalities that managed to lead, to innovate, to produce and to benefit their communities and humanity in general.

Sadly, by time, this freedom became a responsibility not many had earned and, in the absence of observation, clear protocols and a legal state; the Egyptian Medical Students Association began to drift towards other personal goals and people began getting distracted from the real reasons why this place was created for in the first place.

30 years later, entire decades of corruption and personal gratifications became the standard and everything else came second. Year after year, generation following generation EMSA turned into the bitter medicine all had to swallow in order to serve their local committees & sometimes their own selves. It was finally time to do something and it has become very clear to us that the official legal accreditation of EMSA as an NGO is the only way to ensure its integrity and stability against personal interests and disputes.

Unfortunately this opinion was not shared by all, in fact, people who already had what they wanted opposed the idea and began taking even more corrupted and twisted measures to counteract any efforts done in this direction. Banning, exclusion, forgeries, lobbying and continuous refusal of any sort of communication were to add to the ongoing parade of obstacles and counteracting measures aiming at putting this initiative to end.

Will defying challenges have almost succeeded in murdering our dream of a stable, productive working environment for all to coexist in. Yet, it seems our unity and ambitions were stronger than anyone’s expectations. What didn’t kill us really made us stronger, much stronger.

We learnt that our history is an endless source of experiences and values we should incorporate in our system of believes. Our own mistakes are the most valuable treasure trove. By acknowledging our history without trying to hide it, we’re making our task much easier. We turned to our origins and made our first headquarter in the heart of El Saida Zeinab, this town that started it all for this metropolitan we now know as Cairo.

In the 3rd of December 2007, building 3, Prince Aziz street became the birth place of the first, one and only officially recognized and accredited NGO representing Egyptian Medical Students in Egypt and worldwide. This first home stands for our ambitions, reminds us of our hard times and promises us the brightest future.

This very tedious task of re-creating EMSA is still being challenged and we have every intention to dive right into the heart of each and every one of those. Our ambitions and dreams surpass the 7th sky and it gives us the greatest sense of fulfillment and satisfaction to see how our child is growing day after day, slowly but surely.

Every day we witness the development of this little sparkle in the eyes of our new members taking their first steps into our dream-come-true and beginning their EMSA journey by reciting in one united voice our EMSA oath.