Eighteen years on the trails, nine guide families on the books, one shared notebook.

How it started.

In the spring of 2007, three guide families who had been independently leading desert and oasis walks out of Tunis Village met to discuss a recurring problem. Each had received visiting families that summer who arrived under the impression they were booking a child-suitable trek and instead found themselves on an itinerary written by an operator in Cairo who had never walked the route with a child. The families agreed that the only honest answer was to publish their own working logbook of trails — one which only included routes a member family would, and did, walk with their own children. The cooperative was registered in November 2007 with three founding families. The first published catalogue, in March 2008, listed three trails. The catalogue grew slowly because the test is unforgiving: any trail that a member family's own children could not walk twice without complaint did not pass the second walk and did not enter the catalogue.

The cooperative was named for the two objects that organise a Fayoum desert journey — the compass that gives bearing in the empty space and the camel that carries the family's water and shaded loads when the children's legs are too tired. Both metaphors and both literal: we use compasses on every overnight trail, and we walk three of our eight trails with at least one cargo camel.

The nine families.

The El-Sayyad family (founding) — Karim and Aisha el-Sayyad, with three children now in their teens and twenties. Karim was a desert guide with the Wadi Rayan rangers from 1998 to 2006 before founding the cooperative. The family runs the Tunis Village base, hosts the cooperative's office and library, and leads the Wadi El-Hitan and Lake Qarun trails. Karim is the current chair of the cooperative board.

The Tayel family (founding) — Mariam Tayel and her husband Mohsen, with two daughters. Mariam was the first woman to be licensed as a Fayoum desert guide by the Egyptian Tourism Authority, in 2004. The family leads the overnight White Desert trail and the star-watching evening from the Wadi Rayan dunes.

The Abu Hashem family (founding) — Hassan Abu Hashem and his wife Salma, with four children. Hassan is the cooperative's senior cameleer and runs the cargo-camel logistics for the three trails that use them. The family leads the Tunis pottery loop and the Bedouin fire-cooking workshops at the family camp.

The Mansour family (joined 2011) — Bedouin family from the Maghagha area, relocated to Tunis Village in 2009. Lead the camel-walk segment of the Wadi El-Hitan trail and the dune-crossing on the White Desert overnight.

The Issawi family (joined 2013) — Coptic family with a permaculture farm three kilometres west of Tunis Village. Host the family-camp food on every trail and lead the spring agricultural-walk segment for visiting school groups. The farm produces the bread, olive oil and dried fruit served on cooperative trails.

The Habashi family (joined 2014) — Bedouin family with deep birding knowledge. Lead the Lake Qarun shoreline trail and run the November-to-February flamingo-watching extension. Maintain the cooperative's bird checklist (one hundred and forty-eight species observed on cooperative trails since 2008).

The Saad family (joined 2017) — Coptic family from a village near the southern shore of Lake Qarun. Run the family camp at the Whale Valley access point and the toilet logistics across the cooperative's network. Maintain the four water-source maps the cooperative publishes annually.

The Yusuf family (joined 2019) — Nubian family who relocated north from Aswan in the early 2000s. Lead the Wadi Rayan canyon walk and the southern-camp music evenings. The eldest son, Tarek, now runs the cooperative's WhatsApp coordination with arriving families.

The Salim family (joined 2022) — Bedouin family with two young children who have grown up on the trails. The newest member family; currently scouting two proposed trails in the Wadi Rayan extension area that may enter the catalogue in 2027 or 2028.

Cooperative governance.

The cooperative is governed by a six-member board elected every two years from the member families. Board terms are staggered so that three members are elected at each cycle. The current board, elected in October 2025, comprises Karim el-Sayyad (chair), Mariam Tayel (vice-chair, also editorial coordinator), Hassan Abu Hashem (treasurer), Salma Abu Hashem (secretary, also conservation liaison), Aida Habashi (member, birding coordinator), and Tarek Yusuf (member, the youngest cooperative member at twenty-four). The board meets in person twice a year at the cooperative office in Tunis Village; minutes are published in summary form in the December trail update and in full on request.

All editorial decisions on the trail catalogue — addition of a new trail, removal of an existing one, change of recommended age range or seasonal window — require a two-thirds board vote and the consent of the proposing or affected guide family. The chair holds a casting vote only in procedural matters. No outside member, sponsor or visiting writer has voting rights.

Funding and independence.

Three sources kept the cooperative solvent in 2025. Annual memberships from visiting families and individuals contributed roughly fifty-five percent of revenue across the year. The Egyptian Wildlife Trust conservation grant — paid annually for the Wadi El-Hitan citizen-science fossil-monitoring work that two of our member families coordinate — contributed twenty-six percent. The remaining nineteen percent came from a Fayoum Heritage Foundation grant for the Tunis pottery-loop preservation work and from small workshop fees paid by visiting school groups. No tour operator, travel agency, accommodation provider, transport company or sponsorship-seeking brand has funded the cooperative at any point in its eighteen-year history. A full financial statement is published in the December trail update and made available to members and to journalists on request.

Editorial independence in practice.

The trail files are written by the proposing guide family, reviewed by two other member families with similar terrain experience, and signed off by the board at the half-year meeting. Editorial corrections — for instance, a water source noted as flowing that is now dry, or a seasonal window that has shifted because of regional climate change — are issued in writing within ninety days of the discovery and are circulated to all members and to anyone who has walked the affected trail in the past twelve months. Twelve corrections have been issued in the cooperative's history.

Safety record.

The cooperative has had no medical evacuation in eighteen years, no serious injury beyond minor scrapes and one ankle sprain, no overnight emergency on a trail and no lost-child incident at a camp. Every named guide carries a satellite phone for trails outside cellular range, a first-aid kit appropriate to family use, twenty percent emergency water above the calculated requirement, and the emergency contact for the Fayoum tourist police and the Wadi Rayan ranger station. The cooperative has a written emergency protocol that is reviewed annually and shared with any visiting family on request.

The cooperative office.

The cooperative office is the converted ground floor of the El-Sayyad family home, two streets back from the Lake Qarun shore in Tunis Village. The office has a small library of regional natural-history references, the printed archive of every trail file since 2008, and the cooperative's mapping table where the seasonal updates are drawn. Visitors are welcome by appointment on Thursday afternoons; tea is served on the veranda and the library is open to use. The office telephone, answered by Salma Abu Hashem, is staffed Sunday through Thursday from 10:00 to 14:00 Cairo time; outside those hours leave a message and we will return the call on the next office day.

Correspondence.

Write to [email protected] for trail enquiries, membership questions, conservation correspondence, or any other matter that needs the cooperative's attention. Telephone the office on +20 84 6629 318 during office hours. Postal correspondence — for instance, member newsletters returned undelivered — to the Tunis Village address; mark the envelope "cooperative office, El-Sayyad family residence" so the village post knows where to drop it.