5 Egyptians Who Showed Us It's Never Too Late for Dreams

Since no one’s saying it, we’ll be the first to admit it. No one likes hearing the phrase “follow your dreams, no matter your age” because, other than being very cheesy, it doesn’t feel real.

We all want to follow our dreams and make them real right away, right now if we can help it. So when we don’t get there quickly, well, we start feeling the disillusionment quite hard.

But here’s the thing. Dreams aren’t shelved away after a particular age time-frame and, if that sounds too unrealistic to you, then you’ll be glad to see that some people did make it happen. And we can learn rather a lot from them.

Ezzeldin Bahader

This 75 year-old grandfather of six recently made his Egyptian Third Tier League debut, effectively silencing everyone who said some ages are too old for such a physical sport.

Bahader didn’t stop at that, either. In his debut, he played the entire game (coming off a knee injury too!) and scored off a penalty and is currently one game away from getting into the Guinness Book of Records.

Sohair El-Attar

A killer combination of brains and brawn, 74 year-old pathology professor Sohair El-Attar has always had a burgeoning passion for swimming, even though she’d taken a moderately-long hiatus to focus on her academic pursuits.

That hiatus, though, did little to quell her thirst for a good swim meet and so Sohair returned to the pools and won the silver medal in the women’s 200m backstroke at the 18th edition of the World Masters Championship.

Youssef Dawood

If you’ve ever wondered who was the first actor to show Egypt that age is nothing but a number (in certain cases), you’ll be pleased to know that it was none other than Youssef Dawood.

Dawood didn’t even start out as an actor, despite his ever-present passion for the craft. He started out as an electrical engineer who only shifted his focus to acting after twenty-five years in his first profession. And forty films and countless TV shows later, we can all see Dawood chose the right thing.

Mona El-Erian

Graduating with a Pharmacy BSc from Cairo University and going on to get her PhD from Oxford in the late 70’s, Dr. Mona El-Erian started out as a normal chemist and worked hard for quite some time before the fated day when she discovered how harmful her daughter’s shampoo was.

Dr. Mona was overcome with a determination to make natural products for her daughter to use and out of that desire, Nefertari, a company specializing in all-natural body-care products, was born in 1998. The rest, of course, is history.

See? It might not be a walk in the park but dreams don’t come with an expiry date.