Fifty Years on, the Nile Dam That Changed the Face of Egypt
(WorldNews Greece)

MANIAL SULTAN, Egypt — Yassin Saeed remembers when the Nile's annual flood drenched his village in the years before the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Now, former flood lands are green fields year-round. "Our lives were very hard," said the 76-year-old Egyptian, recounting how his father, his brothers and other farmers had to use the traditional felucca sailboats to harvest the corn crops in the flooded fields. The area was flooded at least a third of the year; the villagers would erect mud barriers to prevent waters from reaching their homes. Then came the dam, which officially opened after more than a decade of construction on January 15, 1971. Built in the 1950s...