EGYPT: Fringe Benefits

Moving among the tables in the Ibis café in Cairo's new Nile Hilton Hotel, pretty Afaf Abou Ali, 22, daughter of a well-to-do Alexandria family and owner of a B.A. degree from Alexandria University, went about her waitress job with more spirit than the job usually gets elsewhere in the world. After all, jobs for long-sheltered Egyptian women have until lately been few and far between, and her $150 a month at the Hilton was three times what she could earn in government work. Besides, there were unexpected fringe benefits: one day a guest who made a point of...

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