Contributor: Sherry Mikhael

This week, Egyptians began voting in their freest elections in decades after ousting President Hosni Mubarak earlier this year. Sherry Mikhael, Mercy Corps' operations officer in Egypt, recounts her experience yesterday casting a ballot in the historic elections.

The doors were supposed to open at 8 in the morning, and me and my mum were voting at the same school. (There were separate schools for women and men to vote.) We decided to go at exactly 8 so that we would be at the beginning of the line and finish early. But apparently a lot of Egyptians had the same idea.

Anyways, we went and stood in line. There were about 70 people in front of us. We kept waiting and became very good friends with people standing around us in line, since they didn't open the doors of the school until 12 or 12:30. They said the problem was that the papers were not there yet, and that was the same case for the whole neighborhood and some other neighborhoods.

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