Omar Wael Hamed Profile Interview Piece
It is 8.13 in the morning and birds are whistling gently but persistently at the background as young gentleman with deep confident baritone records the voice message. “I know everything about Cairo, it’s my home you know,” says Omar Wael Hamed, sophomore journalist in his 20s at the American University in Cairo.
On his profile picture he stands on the left side, hugging with two other friends. This picture sits in a small WhatsApp icon next to the contact name, that is all WhatsApp user gets to see. In calm steady tone with southern American accent he narrates about travels. Born in Germany at the age of three Omar with his family moved to Cairo. While his dad has been working in US and Russia, Omar’s grandparents lived all their life in UAE. Besides visiting them Omar had been traveling to other countries but if he would have to choose his favorite place in the world it would be either US or UAE “as it feels like second home.” Fast enough he proceeds to the next interview question. Short, almost precise recordings address the essence.
“It’s my favorite sports to both watch and play” says Omar about basketball. “I’m always at the basketball court, I’m always there, ha,” he shortly laughs finishing the phrase. Omar and his friends have their own culture and society in the court, but it’s common for them to join other teams and it ends up being a full court match, “we tend to form friendship. . .this is why I say we have our own culture inside the court.” Omar does not play for the school team, it’s certainly a hobby for him. “I’m a good player, but I’m definitely not an expert. . . also I’m a bit short to be on the team, I’m not gonna lie I’m 5 ft 9, I can’t even dunk,” he noticed.
Street skateboarding is another sports Omar enjoys. Started off in a childhood first he was just using environment around him to do the tricks, later he got to visit skateparks. He loves skateboarding but confesses that even these days sometimes he is not sure about those ramps and verts and needs couple trials in order to master them. “When you look at my FB profile picture where I’m just sitting there with an injured hand, yeah, that was because I fell down from a ramp and injured my hand pretty badly.” He concludes here, “in order to learn you must fall and that’s the best part about skateboarding.”
“I don’t have daily routine. I just wake up and do whatever I feel like doing,” he softly pauses at this moment “maybe except on Fridays because I love music.” On Fridays musical artists drop their new releases on digital platforms and Omar prefers to keep himself updated with the industry right away. He wakes up, checks music news, goes to prayer, chit-chats with his mom about passed working week and does homework for the upcoming. That’s the only day during the week when Omar sticks to a certain plan. Saturdays through Thursdays are scattered, and plans are limited only to self care rituals.
Minoring in film studies Omar is hesitant between career of a photojournalist and a short movie director. He likes both writing and photography, uses his dad’s Canon 60D to take shots and prefers paper over the laptop text editors for writing. “I’m not a camera expert but anything that takes photos is fine by me,” he says. He always loved films and sees more to movies than technicality, than acting itself. “The mechanism that is responsible for the movie — that’s what always attracted me to it,” next moment he recalls childhood flashbacks, how he would shoot films where he and his friends were running around the house with the Nerf guns, making a mess and his mom scream. “Good old times though, but what I like the most about this is the process of thinking of the movie,” his favorite parts are scriptwriting and preproduction.
Omar Wael Hamed does not want to shoot a big budget movie, “this is something that I’ve always been interested to do, yeah, being a short movie director.”
Anastasiia Gerasimchuk, senior student majoring in Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Bulgaria. She had completed a lot of creative assignments during her academic career, but for the first time was conducting profile interview via WhatsApp.
