Greetings listeners, this is Daniel Denver, the host of the Dig.

This month we're launching a new show.

It's a series of narrative stories we'll publish one every month.

If you heard our last series, Antibody, in 2020 it's like that.

Instead of COVID though, it's about everything.

It's a place for documentary reporting, personal narrative, and experimental stories, about

all the topics we normally cover on the Dig, but in a different format.

Our first story is about Egypt, which, after years of protest beginning in 2011, has seen

intense state backlash and an authoritarian restoration.

Omar Edmund started working on this story while spending a lot of afternoons on his grandmother's

balcony with her and her neighbors.

In the story, all their names have been changed.

Here's Omar.

My grandmother lives in Cairo, in an upper middle-class neighborhood called Sheraton.

It was named after the hotel that occupied the big, glass walled building at the neighborhood's edge.

The building is now a hilton, but the name stuck.

Sheraton was planned during a construction boom in the 1980s as an extension of Heliopolis,

one of Cairo's earliest suburbs.

Unlike the other new developments that took root in the open desert, Sheraton was contained,

boxed in by the airport and a military airfield.

It made for a walkable quiet neighborhood.

My grandmother had a balcony, she could walk through the neighborhood to meet friends,

...