Egypt's vanishing village men: Risking it all to get to Europe
DUBAI — Thousands of men are vanishing from Egypt's poor rural villages. Days later, they call their families to say they're in neighboring Libya and need 140,000 Egyptian pounds ($4,500) to pay smugglers promising them passage to Europe.
It's a scenario that's been repeated over and over in past years, but last year there was a notable change: The number of Egyptians leaving their country this way began to climb dramatically just as the country's economy began to plummet and inflation skyrocketed.
Mahmoud Ibrahim, 28, is one of the men who disappeared. It happened in June.
He had hardly ever left his town in the northern Egyptian province of Sharqiya, where the Nile River flows into the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, his family says he'd never even ventured as far as Cairo.
They were stunned when he called them from Libya two days after they'd last seen or heard from him. He owed
