3 The Renaissance Dam

One problem with giving my life away to become a shut-in and study constantly while applying for any grants I could find was that I ended up spending all of my free time focused entirely on my own world. As a result, I couldn't catch up with anything on the news, making me unaware of the current world situation.

Starting four years ago, world tension slowly rose over water reserves. It was actually already on the brink of war, with all of it starting due to a conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia over the now rather infamous renaissance dam, a structure made to create enough energy to power the countries of Sudan and Ethiopia at the expense of having less water in the Nile.

When Ethiopia was planning the construction of the dam, the situation was evaluated as at worst only being able to cause a minor conflict, which is why the US tried very little to better relations between Egypt and Ethiopia, only holding a conference to try and get both of them to agree on a solution to their problem.

Despite its best efforts, Egypt could not convince Ethiopia to stop the construction of the Renaissance dam.

Eventually, as time passed, tensions between the two countries increased rapidly. To get Ethiopia to stop the dam's construction, Egypt tried to call its allies Israel and Saudi Arabia for help.

Ethiopia didn't back down, though, as not only did it already have the support of Sudan, but it also knew that compared to itself, Egypt's abysmal military would not be able to do much actual damage to the country.

Plus, when it came to Israel and Saudi Arabia, they had only guaranteed to join a war against Ethiopia if Egypt lost land to them, meaning that as long as it could defend successfully, there would be nothing to worry about.

Furthermore, if things somehow managed to go south, Ethiopia could always call on Sudan to help as it also benefited from the dam.

Egypt knew that the effect that the dam would have on itself would be enormous, as its entire economy was based around agriculture, and it got almost all of its water used for farming from the Nile. Therefore, if the Dam were constructed and reduced the water in the Nile by 30% outside the delta and 25% within the delta as estimated, the lack of water would destroy Egypt's economy.

With no other choice left, Egypt was forced to declare war against Ethiopia in one last attempt to save itself. But, of course, Egypt knew that it had zero chance of beating Ethiopia and Sudan, as they would only be defending. Therefore, it planned to try and raise enough awareness to get other countries involved and basically get saved.

And although the UN did try its best to bring the problem to the attention of the other countries with the hopes of helping Egypt out, all of the other countries avoided the problem under the excuse that they had their own problems to deal with and that they didn't have the ability to help even if they wanted to.

As for the US, Egypt's final hope decided not to intervene because it focused more on fixing its own problems. It would only help prevent Egypt from being invaded or attacked.

To their credit, though, at the time, the US had actually started to make important progress when it came to improving its own infrastructure and poverty rates.

And so, Egypt's final attempt ended up being futile. Although they would not get invaded, the damage from the dam would remain, for even if the UN sent its forces to stop the war, Ethiopia would still win, as despite how it looked, Ethiopia wasn't the aggressor but was defending itself, plus it wasn't planning to invade Egypt in the future anyway.

Despite how hard they fought, the Egyptian forces were only able to make it through Sudan (which was not heavily defended), not breaking through to Ethiopia.

Moreover, even if they got there with all of their forces, they would have still been no match. They would have to fight Ethiopia's strong military and fight in terrain that benefited the defenders added to Ethiopia's Chinese monetary support.

After some final attempts to break through into Ethiopia, Egypt was forced to retreat and re-establish a peaceful relationship with Ethiopia.

Ethiopia was more than happy to accept as it had not really lost much during the 'war' and only asked for Egypt to pay reparations for all of the things they had lost (which, as stated before, wasn't much).

To the outside world, the end of this small conflict had come to an end. They thought that life would move on like usual, as predicted though, after the dam finished construction Egypt's agricultural land began to diminish in size, only stopping when its total land that Egyptians could use for agriculture declined by 46%.

This led to what at the time was the biggest humanitarian crisis in history, with the 23% of Egypt's population that were farmers being the most affected by this change; needless to say, the Egyptian economy crashed, and tons of people that had been on the fence decided that they had to leave the country until things went back to normal.

When agricultural land began to diminish in size, the Egyptian populous was understandably scared. Still, the government tried its best to assure that the estimates were wrong and that Egypt's amount of agricultural land would not diminish much more than it already had. That the current loss was the expected amount.

Of course, very few people actually bought into this, especially since Egypt went to the extent of declaring war to stop this from happening.

This led to many people leaving Egypt until everything returned to normal, with the plan of staying in Southern European countries for a while.

At first, Southern European countries saw this as a positive since an increase in tourism would only help their economies, that is until it became apparent that Egypt wasn't going back to normal for a long time, and some of the people that had come there temporarily were beginning to consider attempting to apply for citizenship.

Now having around 30 million people that were beginning to consider applying for citizenship, the Southern European countries reasonably began to freak out, not because of the number of people, but because almost all of them had all come here with only enough money to make due for a couple of months before having to go back to Egypt.

Meaning that if the European countries accepted them, they would have a hard time integrating into society, and more importantly, getting jobs, especially when the number of people trying to do the same thing at the same time was this big, so in an attempt to prevent this problem Southern European countries added temporary requirements to becoming a citizen.